Justice Ginsburg opens up

by James Oliphant

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean her path to the nation’s highest court was any easier than Sandra Day O’Connor’s.

In a lengthy interview given to Legal Times columnist Debra Bruno, Ginsburg opens up about being one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School in 1956, and reveals that she has surprisingly little bitterness about past career injustices despite the fact that no large law firm would hire her upon her graduation. (It’s ironic, too, if you consider that much of her legal career prior to joining the court was fighting for women’s equality along on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights shops.)

As the column notes:

Her very first class, she says, included journalist Anthony Lewis, who was studying at Harvard for one year on a Nieman fellowship. “On the first day, he gave a response that was so brilliant that I said, ‘If they’re all like that, I’ll never make it,’” Ginsburg recalls. And she pauses and adds, “Then I said, ‘He is going to be my model. I’m going to speak in class.’”

It’s that pause, the eyeing of the barrier, and then the forging onward that might be the character trait that carried Ginsburg past all the petty injustices and the greater rebuffs that stopped many other women. In conversation, she seems to have no bitterness about what could have — and did sometimes — hold her back. She recently told an audience at an Atlanta synagogue that if she had been able to get a job in a corporate law firm when she finished law school, she would be a retired partner today, not a Supreme Court justice. In Ginsburg’s experience, adversity can offer some surprising advantages.

You can read more about Ginsburg’s thoughts about her trailblazing career, and about her children, her husband’s battle with cancer, and dealing with the issue of “potty equity” here.