A conversation with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

• Author: Metzger, Gillian E.
• Position: Symposium Honoring the Advocacy, Scholarship, and Jurisprudence of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Interview

Professor Gillian Metzger: Katherine, thank you for that wonderful overview of all that the Justice has achieved and the history of Columbia Law School. And I want to apologize for those to whom I am showing my back, but this will allow us to have more of a conversation with the Justice.

Justice, thank you so much for being with us today. It is a real privilege for us to get to talk to you this way, and we know for the entire audience. You have had--as you have now heard (LAUGHS)--an amazing and just tremendously varied career, spanning so many different roles of academic, public interest advocate, judge, now Justice. We can't possibly cover all of this in the time we have this morning, but what we are hoping to do is talk a little bit about each of these roles, how each step you took influenced the rest, and then we will be throwing it open after our conversation for questions from the audience.

We thought we'd begin at the beginning or reasonably close to it.

You grew up in Brooklyn and you attended Cornell on a full scholarship, graduated in 1954. And then you went to law school, and you spent your first two years at Harvard where you were one of nine women in a class of more than five hundred. Then came to Columbia where you were one of twelve women--you gained three female cohorts--but out of a class I believe of more than two hundred and eighty. So one first question is what made you decide to go to law school and what was it like being at law school in a group of so few women?

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Gillian, may I just make two footnotes to the splendid introduction that was given for me? I was not the first woman on the Columbia Law faculty. I was the first tenured woman, but Harriet Rabb was here, she came the year before I did, and she started up an employment discrimination clinic with George Cooper. That was the clinic that took on AT&T, The New York Times, and the major Wall Street law firms, and many more. (APPLAUSE) The second footnote is a question for you. I do work terribly hard, you know that, but don't you think that David Souter was number one in how many hours of the day he worked? (LAUGHS)

Metzger: I have to say my recollection is that everybody worked ridiculous hours at the Court (LAUGHS), but yes.

Ginsburg: But now let me turn to your question. You asked how I became interested in the law. One big turn-on for me was that I was going to college at a time that was not very good for the United States. It was the 50s, the heyday of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who saw a communist in every corner. I was working for a professor of constitutional law, Robert Cushman, as a research assistant. He wanted me to understand how far we were straying from our most fundamental values. And in the course of my work with him, I saw that there were lawyers, brave lawyers, standing up for the people who were called before the Senate Internal Security Committee, the House Un-American Activities Committee. So I thought, well, maybe that's what I would like to do. The other powerful influence was my dear spouse. We had decided that we would do together whatever it was. Medical school dropped out early on, thank goodness, because the chemistry labs interfered with golf practice. (LAUGHS) So then it came down to business school and law school. Well, Harvard, the university Marry set his sights on, made that decision easy for us. Women were not admitted to the business school until the 60s. The law school just started admitting women in 1950, '50-'51 was the first year. I think my father was rather concerned about my interest in becoming a lawyer because, realistically, there wasn't much of a demand for women lawyers. (LAUGHS) But then, when I got married, then it was fine because, after all, I would have a man to support me. (LAUGHS) So did I leave out any part of your question? (LAUGHS)

Professor Abbe Gluck: No, that was perfect. So Justice, you graduated from Columbia in 1959, and by 1963, you were teaching in academia. And as Professor Franke mentioned, your first love seemed to be procedure, particularly Swedish procedure. But by 1972, you had helped launch the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and you were writing, litigating, and thinking about gender discrimination. And so we're curious if you could tell us a little more about how you got into the area and how in particular it was that you wound up working with the ACLU?

Ginsburg: My eyes were opened up in Sweden. This was in '62 and '63--women were about a quarter of the law students there, perhaps three percent in the United States. It was already well accepted that a family should have two wage-earners. A woman named Eva Moberg wrote a column in the Stockholm Daily paper with the headline, "Why should the woman have two jobs and the man only one?" And the thrust of it was, yes, she is expected to have a paying job, but she should also have dinner on the table at seven, take her children to buy new shoes, to their medical check-ups, and the rest. The notion that he should do more than take out the garbage sparked debates that were very interesting to me. Also in the months I spent there, a woman came to Sweden from Arizona to have an abortion. Her name was Sherri Finkbine. She had taken thalidomide and there was a grave risk that the fetus, if it survived, would be terribly deformed. So she came to Sweden and there was publicity that she was there because she had no access to a legal abortion in her home state. Well, that was at the start of the 60s. I put it all on a back burner until the late 60s when the women's movement came alive in the United States.

My students, then at Rutgers, asked for a course on sex discrimination and the law. And I went to the library and inside of a month read every federal court decision on gender discrimination--no mean feat at all because there were so few, so very few. Also I had signed up as a volunteer lawyer with the ACLU of New Jersey, more because it was a respectable way of getting litigation experience than out of ideological reasons, I will admit. Complaints from women began trickling into the office, new kinds of complaints. For example, women who were school teachers were required to leave the classroom the minute their pregnancy began to show because, after all, the children shouldn't be led to think their teachers swallowed a watermelon. (LAUGHS) Anyway, these were women ready, willing, and able to work, but forced out on so-called maternity leave, which meant "You're out, and if we want you back, we'll call."

Another group of new complainants were women who had blue-collar jobs and wanted the same health insurance package for their family that a man would get. A woman could get health insurance for herself, but she wasn't considered the breadwinner in the family. Only the man got family benefits. And just to indicate the variety, there was a wonderful summer program at Princeton. The National Organization for Women complained about it. Princeton had already become co-educational. The summer program was for students at the end of the sixth grade. It was a Summer in Engineering program. The children came on campus, they had an enriched program in math and science. There was just one problem: it was for boys, not girls. I should also mention one other complainant. Abbe Seldin was her name. She was the best tennis player in her Teaneck, New Jersey high school, but she couldn't be on the varsity team. There was no team for girls, and although she could beat all the boys, she couldn't be on the team. So all this was underway. People were lodging complaints they were either too timid to make before or were sure they would lose. But in the 70s they could become winners because there was a spirit in the land, a growing understanding that the way things had been was not right and should be changed.

Metzger: That leads wonderfully to the gender discrimination litigation that you then started. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what your first cases were about, and as that litigation progressed, what your strategy was in trying to set up the issues before the Court.

Ginsburg: Well, it has been said that I was mostly a champion of men's rights. I think what I've just said about the school teachers and the blue-collar workers should lead you to conclude that that's a questionable description. (LAUGHS) But the first case I litigated did involve a man. His name was Charles E. Moritz, a man who took good care of his mother, then age eighty-nine. Moritz was in his sixties. (1) He was a never-married man. The Internal Revenue Code at the time allowed a deduction for the care of a child or a disabled dependent of any age. The deduction was available to any woman or any widowed or divorced man. Charles E. Moritz did not fit any of those categories. He litigated his case pro se in the tax court with a brief that was the soul of simplicity. It said, "If I were a dutiful daughter, I would get this deduction. I'm a dutiful son. This makes no sense." The tax court said "We glean that the taxpayer is making a constitutional argument. (LAUGHS) But everyone knows the Internal Revenue Code, which makes so many arbitrary distinctions, is immune from constitutional challenge." (LAUGHS) Well, my husband, who was a great tax lawyer and teacher, noticed this case in the tax advance sheets, and said, "I'd like you to read this opinion." With some impatience, I answered, "Marty, you know I don't read tax cases." (LAUGHS) "Read this one," he said. I did, and immediately reacted, "Let's take it." And so we did. I regard the brief filed in the Tenth Circuit in the Moritz case as kind of the grandparent brief.

The next Supreme Court brief was prepared in a case called Reed v. Reed. (2) As any of you who has taken a gender discrimination class or even a constitutional law class should know, Reed v. Reed was the turning-point gender discrimination case in the Supreme Court. The case was commenced...