In Memorian. Reflections on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

• Author: Hon. M. Margaret Mckeown
• Pages: 7-8

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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My grandmother was an exacting and

untiring editor. I regularly witnessed her

working late into the night, revising her

clerks’ drafts. My mother assures me

it was the same with her co-counsels’

drafts. She strove for simplicity, clarity,

and brevity: she would tell her clerks

at the beginning of their clerkship year,

and me, when I started law school, that

one wasn’t done writing when there was

nothing left to add but, rather, when

there was nothing left to take out. She

classified advocates as “simplifiers” or

“complicators,” and had little use for the

latter. Both as a litigator and as a Justice,

she brought her mastery of research and

rhetoric to make the Court appreciate the

human drama that underlay the question

of statutory interpretation or application

of precedent that a case presented.

She taught me not to stop working un-

til I was satisfied; that what I had done

was never good enough until it was as

good as I could make it. It is an exacting

standard. But she expected herself, and

those she worked with, to meet it. That

precept applies to any endeavor, but she

honed it first as a litigator. I hope to live

up to her example. q

IN MEMORIAM

Reflections on

Justice Ruth

Bader Ginsburg

HON. M. MARGARET MCKEOWN

The author is a circuit judge on the Ninth Circuit

Court of Appeals.

I was privileged to know Justice Ruth

Bader Ginsburg as a friend, role model,

and icon for equality. In my final year at

Georgetown Law School, I had the for-

tune to “meet” her when she was a pro-

fessor at Columbia Law School, and she

graciously answered my plea for materials

on sex discrimination. That willingness to

reach out became her hallmark with so

many aspiring lawyers. She did not lean

in for herself—she leaned down to lift up

others. Her generous gesture blossomed

into a wonderful friendship over the years,

through teaching together in France, shar-

ing many meals and family stories, engag-

ing in international rule of law endeavors,

and sharing a love of music.

I love that her diminutive stature be-

lied a fearsome intellect. She loved the

law and was an incredible role model for

me as a judge. She took care with every

word. Her writing was powerful, but never

mean, caustic, or snarky, even in her near-

ly 150 dissents. In those dissents, Justice

Ginsburg appealed to the “intelligence of