Doing justice

A collection of essays, writings and speeches provides insight into the life and mind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

By AARON LEIBEL
Updated: SEPTEMBER 21, 2020 12:17
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (photo credit: REUTERS)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(photo credit: REUTERS)
It’s no accident that so many voters were focused on future Supreme Court appointments during the recent US presidential campaign. In addition to being the country’s ultimate appellate tribunal, the high court possesses impressive legislative powers – the ability to strike down laws that it considers incongruent with the country’s Constitution.
Many of the most controversial issues in American public life during the past 75 years – school integration, abortion, gun ownership and campaign finance reform, to name a few – have been largely decided by the court.
That’s the reason that some Republican voters, conceding that their party’s candidate was far outside the mainstream, with neither conservative nor even Republican bona fides, nonetheless voted for him, for they wanted Donald Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton, to appoint new justices.
And now, everyone is waiting with baited breath to see just who President Trump will appoint to replace the late Antonin Scalia – and potentially future justices as well.
With that background, the publication of the ideas of one of the court’s veteran justices, as expressed in her speeches, newspaper articles and court opinions, takes on special significance.
Since her appointment by former president Bill Clinton in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been a loyal member of the court’s liberal bloc. That’s hardly surprising, for Ginsburg is an American Jew who was born in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. It is likely that all her friends’ parents were enthusiastic supporters of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal, which launched the modern American liberal movement.
Ginsburg’s mother, we are told in the book, often read Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper columns aloud to her daughter.
And president Harry Truman appointed FDR’s wife as a delegate to the newly formed United Nations.
Therefore, readers will not be stunned to learn that Ginsburg penned a paean in her elementary school newspaper, the first document in the book, to that newly established liberal icon and its charter.
She attended three Ivy League universities (Cornell, Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School), where again liberalism was the dominant, if not the monopolistic, force among both students and faculty. And she was appointed to an appellate court by liberal Democratic president Jimmy Carter.
Her papers are divided into five sections, each launched with a short introduction written by the book’s editors – and Ginsburg’s authorized biographers, Georgetown Law professors Mary Hartnett and Wendy Williams.
Unlike some American Jews, often of the extreme liberal persuasion, Ginsburg never equivocated about her Jewish background. Her family was not particularly religious, the book’s editors write, but “Jewish traditions” were important in her upbringing. She appreciated her people’s “reverence for justice and learning,” liked studying Hebrew and Jewish history and especially was inspired by the stories of the biblical judge and prophet Deborah.
In a 2009 speech to the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Ginsburg discussed the progress that Jews had made in the US, noting that they “today face few closed doors and do not fear letting the world know who we are.”
And in 2001, she told the National Council of Jewish Women that she was “born, raised, and proud of being a Jew.”
Yet, the editors write, “she resented what she saw as sometime rigid adherence to seemingly hypocritical rules and the inferior role assigned to women.”
Women and gender equality certainly have been causes she has championed during her career. Speaking at the Wake Forest Law School’s Summer Program in 2009, Ginsburg noted that during “the blossoming” of the feminist movement in the 1970s, she was well positioned to help “place women’s rights permanently on the human rights agenda in the United States.”
She and her partners at the ACLU had tried “to spark judges’ and lawmakers’ understanding that their own daughters and granddaughters could be disadvantaged by the way things were.” They dealt with those attorneys, she said, as if they, “on the realities underlying our cases, had not advanced much beyond the third grade.”
When, in 2007, the court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which criminalized “intact dilation and evacuation,” one of the procedures used in lateterm abortions, Ginsburg in a dissenting opinion termed it “an effort to chip away at” women’s abortion rights.
Certainly Scalia, who died in 2016, did not agree with that opinion – nor with the vast majority of Ginsburg’s views. In strictly political-ideological terms, the two should have been irreconcilable enemies.
But neither justice permitted that to happen.
“Justice Scalia was a man of many talents, a jurist of captivating brilliance, high spirits and quick wit, possessed of a rare talent for making even the most somber judge smile,” said Ginsburg in summing up the 2015-16 court term. She continued: “It was my great fortune to have known him as a working colleague and dear friend. The Court is a paler place without him.”
As it will be when the outspoken Ginsburg, who is 83, steps down. But with Trump in office, that may not be any time soon.
Aaron Leibel is a former editor at The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish Week. His novel Generations: The Story of a Jewish Family, which spans 1,500 years and three continents, is available online.


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