My Own Words

by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“She goes without hesitation everywhere, accepts all the invitations that she wishes to accept, goes out at night when there is anything that is attractive to her.”69 Nellie died in 1943, one week shy of her eighty-second birthday.70 She lived to see all three of her children—her sons Robert and Charles and her daughter Helen, once dean of Bryn Mawr College—gain law degrees.71

Chief Justice Rehnquist commented in an address some years ago: “Change is the law of life, and the judiciary will have to change to meet the challenges we will face in the future.”

She loved studying procedure at law school, learning and writing about Swedish procedure in the early sixties, and teaching procedure courses at Rutgers and Columbia law schools.

he principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; . . . it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. —JOHN STUART MILL,1 The Subjection of Women (1869)

“If I were a dutiful daughter instead of a dutiful son, I would have received the deduction. This makes no sense.”

So our trip to the Tenth Circuit mattered a lot. First, it fueled Ruth’s early 1970s career shift from diligent academic to enormously skilled and successful appellate advocate—which in turn led to her next career on the higher side of the bench. Second, with Dean Griswold’s help, Mr. Moritz’s case furnished the litigation agenda Ruth actively pursued until she joined the D.C. Circuit in 1980.

All in all, great achievements from a tax case with an amount in controversy that totaled exactly $296.70.