Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg (born March 15 1933, Brooklyn, New York) is an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Court, she was a professor at Rutgers University School of Law, Newark School of Law and Columbia Law School, a litigator for the ACLU, and a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. During much of her life, she has been active in the women's rights movement, and is today considered a member of the Court's liberal wing.

Early life

Ginsburg was born Ruth Joan Bader in Brooklyn, New York, the second daughter of Nathan and Celia (Amster) Bader. Ginsburg's family called her "Kiki". Her mother took an active role in her education, taking her to the library often. Ginsburg attended James Madison High School, whose law program later dedicated a courtroom in her honor. Her older sister died when she was very young. Her mother struggled with cancer throughout Ginsburg's high school years and died the day before her graduation.

Ruth Bader married Martin D. Ginsburg, later a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and an internationally prominent tax lawyer, in 1954. Their daughter Jane is Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at the Columbia Law School, and their son James is founder and president of Cedille Records, a classical music recording company based in Chicago.

Ginsburg received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1954 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. When Martin took a job in New York City she transferred to Columbia Law School and became the first person ever to be on both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews. She earned her LL.B. degree at Columbia, tied for first in her class.

In 1959 Ginsburg became a law clerk to Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. From 1961 to 1963 she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, learning Swedish to co-author a book on judicial procedure in Sweden. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law (Newark) from 1963 to 1972, and at Columbia Law School from 1972 to 1980, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school case book on sex discrimination.

In 1977 she became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. As the chief litigator of the ACLU's women's rights project, she argued several cases in front of the Supreme Court and attained a reputation as a skilled oral advocate.

Judicial career

Ginsburg was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980.

President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on June 14 1993. During her subsequent confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, she refused to answer questions regarding her personal views on most issues or how she would adjudicate certain hypothetical situations as a Supreme Court Justice. As she bombasted during the hearings, "Were I to rehearse here what I would say and how I would reason on such questions, I would act injudiciously".

At the same time, however, Ginsburg did answer questions relating to some potentially controversial issues, for instance, she stated that she does believe that there is a constitutional right to privacy, and she explicated at some length on her personal judicial philosophy and thoughts regarding gender equality ([1]). The U.S. Senate confirmed her by a 96 to 3 vote^[1] and she took her seat on August 10 1993. She became the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

Ginsburg has urged a cautious approach to adjudication, arguing in a speech given shortly before her nomination to the Supreme Court that "[m]easured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable." [2] Ginsburg has urged that the Supreme Court allow for dialogue with elected branches.

Though Ginsburg has consistently supported abortion rights and joined in the Supreme Court's opinion striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), she has criticized the court's ruling in Roe v. Wade as terminating a nascent, democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws which she contends might have built a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights. She has also been an advocate for references to foreign law and norms in judicial opinions, in contrast to the textualist views of her colleague Justice Antonin Scalia.

Ginsburg was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer in 1999 and underwent surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The condition appears to be arrested.

In September 2005, amidst speculation that a woman would replace retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg told the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that she felt "any woman would not do", and that she had a list of names which she did not expect the President to read. She also defended her views on paying attention to rulings from other countries.

She is considered to be part of the "liberal wing" in the current court and has a Segal-Cover score of 0.680 placing her as the most liberal (by that measure) of current justices, although more moderate than those of many other post-War justices. In a 2003 statistical analysis of Supreme Court voting patterns, Ginsburg emerged the second most liberal member of the Court (behind Justice Stevens).^[2][3]

Some notable cases in which Ginsburg wrote an opinion:

• United States v. Virginia Court Opinion
• Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. Court Opinion
• Bush v. Gore Dissenting
• Eldred v. Ashcroft Court Opinion
• Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp. Court Opinion

Dispute over relevance of international law

On March 1 2005, in the case of Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court (in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy) ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Constitution forbids executing convicts who committed their crimes before turning 18. In addition to the fact that most states now prohibit executions in such cases, the majority opinion reasoned that the United States was increasingly out of step with the world by allowing minors to be executed, saying "the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty."

Justice Antonin Scalia rejected that approach with strident criticism, saying that the justices' personal opinions and the opinions of "like-minded foreigners" should not be given a role in helping interpret the Constitution.

Ginsburg rejected that argument in a speech given about one month after Roper. "Judges in the United States are free to consult all manner of commentary," she said to several hundred lawyers, scholars, and other members of the American Society of International Law.[3] If a law review article by a professor is a suitable citation, she asked, why not a well reasoned opinion by foreign jurist? Fears about relying too heavily on world opinion "should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey," Ginsburg told the audience.

In response to Roper and other recent decisions, several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution declaring that the "meaning of the Constitution of the United States should not be based on judgments, laws, or pronouncements of foreign institutions unless such foreign judgments, laws or pronouncements inform an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution of the United States." A similar resolution was introduced in the U.S. Senate. In her speech, Ginsburg criticized the resolutions. "Although I doubt the resolutions will pass this Congress, it is disquieting that they have attracted sizable support," she said. "The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification," Ginsburg asserted. "Even more so today, the United States is subject to the scrutiny of a candid world," she said. "What the United States does, for good or for ill, continues to be watched by the international community, in particular by organizations concerned with the advancement of the rule of law and respect for human dignity."[4]

"Ginsburg Precedent"

Over a decade passed between the time Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were appointed and the time another justice left the court. In that time, both Congress and the White House had switched to Republican control. When Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement in the summer 2005 (with William Rehnquist's death a few months later), both sides began to squabble about just how many questions President George W. Bush's nominees would be expected to answer. The debate heated up when hearings for John Roberts began in September 2005. Republicans used an argument that they called the "Ginsburg Precedent", which centered on Ginsburg's confirmation hearings. In those hearings, she did not answer some questions involving matters such as abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state, rights of the disabled, and so on. Only one witness was allowed to testify "against" Ginsburg at her confirmation hearings, and the hearings lasted only four days. They also pointed out that then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden told her not to answer questions that she did not feel comfortable answering.

In a September 28, 2005 speech at Wake Forest University Ginsburg said that Chief Justice Roberts refusing to answer questions on some cases was "unquestionably right." [5] However, as the following sentence in the speech made clear, this statement did not affirm the existence of a "precedent" which the Judiciary Committee was obliged to follow; it was merely a statement the nominee could, at his discretion, refuse to answer questions about how he would rule.

Democrats had argued against Roberts' refusal to answer certain questions, saying that Ginsburg had made her views very clear, even if she did not comment on all specific matters, and that due to her lengthy tenure as a judge, many of her legal opinions were already available for review. Democrats also pointed out that Republican senator Orrin Hatch had recommended Ginsburg to then-President Clinton, which suggested Clinton worked in a bipartisan manner. Hatch responded that he had not "recommended" her but suggested to Clinton she might be a candidate that would not receive great opposition^{[citation needed]}.

During the John Roberts confirmation hearings, Biden, Hatch, and Roberts himself brought up Ginsburg's hearings several times as they argued over how many questions she answered and how many Roberts was expected to answer. The "precedent" was again cited several times during the confirmation hearings for Justice Samuel Alito.

References

Bibliography

• Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN 1-4000-3003-X.

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