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by
Irin Carmon
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January 24 - January 30, 2022
The night before RBG famously fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015, she told me, “I thought to myself, ‘Don’t stay up all night,’ but then my pen was hot.” RBG’s pen is often hot late at night.
“If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.”
“If you can say it in plain English, you should,”
Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”
Grammatical correctness is the beginning, not the end of the story. RBG instructs her clerks always to remember that regular people are affected by the court’s decisions and, if the draft is a majority opinion, always to treat the losing side respectfully.
“I thought, ‘This is my dream of the way the world should be.’ When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated,”
“There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,” RBG recalled. “As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.’”
“I’ll never forget the end,” says Berman. “Instead of ‘by the power invested in me, by whatever’ she said, ‘by the power vested in me by the United States Constitution.’ My wife always jokes that if we got divorced it would be unconstitutional.”
“Dear Sam, I understand that this week my clerks beat your team by a score of 10 to nothing. We expect more, even from the junior justice.”
“Anyway, hope springs eternal. If I lose today, there’s hope that tomorrow will be better.” —RBG, 2012
“I think when it’s wrong,” Scalia says, “it should be destroyed.” But no one, probably least of all Supreme Court justices, changes her or his mind after being called an idiot. Actually changing the law means getting to five votes.
But sometimes, it’s time to give up on persuading anyone else behind the scenes. It’s time to get mad and let everyone else know about it. There are dissents that rose above their times, like in the Dred Scott case in 1857, when seven justices ruled that people of African descent were property and could never be citizens, or in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, where the majority upheld the doctrine of separate but equal. Those dissenters stopped speaking to their fellow justices and started speaking to the public, hoping the future would vindicate them.
Read closely, it very gently suggested the majority was being a bunch of arrogant hypocrites, who had checked their commitment to states’ rights at the door when it served the Republican party.
The irony of this though is that when you set a precedent while it favors your views, it might come back to bite you in the butt when it doesn't favor your views. (Trump wanting a recount on this past election because he believes there was voter fraud)
RBG has never been very interested in drawing attention to herself without a good reason. That’s how you know that when she does send up smoke signals, something has gone very wrong.
At the dawn of the new term in the fall of 2006, TV newsman Mike Wallace reminded RBG that in her confirmation hearings, she had said she expected to see three, four, or even more women on the court with her. “So, where are they?” he asked. “Sadly they are not here,” RBG replied bluntly. “Because the President has not nominated them and the Senate has not confirmed another woman. You would have to ask the political leaders why a woman was not chosen.”
We are about to see 4 women for the first time in 2022!
Her message was clear: The job of representing women should never have fallen to one woman.
Sharing the bench with O’Connor, RBG said in an interview in January 2007, had meant that people could look and say, “Here are two women. They don’t look alike. They don’t always vote alike. But here are two women.” She added, in a rare moment of vulnerability—or maybe pointedness—“The word I would use to describe my position on the bench is ‘lonely.’”
at least Casey explicitly recognized women’s rights and spoke about their equality: “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
“More and more I think that science is going to put this decision in women’s hands,” she said in an interview. “The law will become largely irrelevant.” That’s not at all what happened. Like almost everything else surrounding abortion, that medication became subject to a maze of restrictions blocking women’s access to it.
“our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
Those views, this Court made clear in Casey, “are no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution.” Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right “to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.” Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized, is intimately connected to “their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Thus, legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s
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Nothing prepared Lilly Ledbetter for the anonymous note left in her mailbox one evening, decades into working at the Goodyear Tire plant. Not the man who had told her he took orders from a bitch at home and wasn’t about to take them from a bitch at work, or the boss who told her she could improve her evaluation by meeting him at the Ramada Inn. Ledbetter never found out who left the torn piece of paper with the tire room managers’ salaries. The men each made around fifteen thousand dollars more than she did. That’s when Ledbetter finally went to court.
He wrote, clinically and brusquely, that Ledbetter should have filed a charge of discrimination “within 180 days after each allegedly discriminatory employment decision was made and communicated to her.” As RBG read another dissent from the bench, it was clear that she felt the same kinship Ledbetter had. “It’s the story of almost every working woman of her generation, which is close to mine,” RBG later said. “She is in a job that has been done by men until she comes along. She gets the job, and she’s encountering all kinds of flak. But she doesn’t want to rock the boat.” RBG was now in steady
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Today’s decision counsels: sue early on when it is uncertain whether discrimination accounts for the pay disparity you are beginning to experience. Indeed, initially you may not know that men are receiving more for substantially similar work. Of course, you are likely to lose such a less-than-fully-baked case.
It is wrong that there is a statute of limitations on a case with facts. It's one thing to have witness statements expire but to have written proof expire? That's not right
Small initial discrepancies, even if the employee knows they exist, may not be seen as grounds for a federal case. An employee like Ledbetter, trying to succeed in a male-dominated workplace, in a job filled only by men before she was hired, understandably may be anxious to avoid making waves.
Knowingly carrying past pay discrimination forward must be treated as lawful.
Ten days into his presidency, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, with Ledbetter beaming in red behind him. RBG put a framed copy of the law on her wall. Her ideal of a dialogue between the branches of government had been made reality.
RBG later told me she had changed her colleagues’ minds. “As we live, we can learn,” she said. “It’s important to listen. So I’m very glad that case came out as it did.”
Decades earlier, a young Reagan administration lawyer named John Roberts had coauthored a memo arguing that the law should be written such that incidents of voter suppression would “not be too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable.” Apparently it was harder for Roberts to imagine the intrusiveness of being blocked from voting.
I want to look into organizations that help provide people with transportation and voter education
At oral argument for Shelby County v. Holder, on February 27, 2013, Scalia had a theory for why the law had been so popular in Congress. “I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Scalia said. “It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.” Black people, he implied, had wrested control of the government, and the poor politicians were too scared of looking racist to do anything about it. The court had to rescue
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LMAO coming from a white man. I would have done more than just gasp.
“The court has the reputation of being conservative, but if you take activism to mean readiness to strike down laws passed by Congress, I think the current court will go down in history as one of the most active courts in that regard,” RBG told the New York Times. Her grim predictions have come true. In the years since Shelby, states have jumped to make it harder to vote, in a passel of laws whose impact falls disproportionately on people of color and the poor. “We put down the umbrella because we weren’t getting wet,” RBG said. “But the storm is raging.”
The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. . . . With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.
“Do you believe that the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision?” she replied, “I would have to say no.” Did they, as men, show a “blind spot”? Couric pressed. RBG said they did. “Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny,” RBG said. “I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.” RBG’s most famous words in the Hobby Lobby dissent could
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DATE DECIDED 6/23/03 CASE Gratz v. Bollinger WHAT WAS AT STAKE Is the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program constitutional? RESULT No, because it gets too specific about its diversity goals and methods. RBG SAYS “Actions designed to burden groups long denied full citizenship stature are not sensibly ranked with measures taken to hasten the day when entrenched discrimination and its after effects have been extirpated,” RBG wrote in her dissent.
Last night, my dad and I were discussing the fact that Biden plans to replace Justice Breyer with a black woman. My dads stance on this being, it is racist to only pick from black women. My stance being on it, that for the past 200 years we were only picking from pools of white men and it wasn't until recently that we got more diversity. However, we still have a majority men (6:3) and a majority white (8:1), so the diversity is still sorely lacking. It is not racist to rule out candidates who already make up a majority of the court. However, I do think it de-values the appointment to publically announce you are only picking from a group of black females. It also gives the conservatives fuel to disrespect the person by saying "she only got it because she's a black woman" like what they say about VP Harris
DATE DECIDED 1/21/10 CASE Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission WHAT WAS AT STAKE How much can the government regulate corporate spending in elections? RESULT Not much, according to a 5–4 opinion by Kennedy. RBG SAYS “If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United,” RBG told The New Republic. “I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.”
I 1000% agree
“Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.” —RBG’s Bush v. Gore dissent, December 12, 2000
“The stain of generations of racial oppression is still visible in our society and the determination to hasten its removal remains vital.” —RBG’s Gratz v. Bollinger dissent, June 23, 2003
mean, she’s not the heaviest or stoutest lady, but she’s tough,” says Johnson. “She works just as hard in the gym as she does on the bench.”
At twenty-nine, RBG discovered the Canadian Air Force workout at a tax conference with Marty, and she has performed it almost daily since. Designed in the 1950s, its moves include quick spurts of toe-touching, knee-raising, arm-circling, and leg-lifting.
I'm looking this up
“I told Ruth she should sit in the back of the boat, because she was so light that if they hit a rock, she would go flying over,” Neuborne says. “Her response: ‘I don’t sit in the back.’”
“She uses her mind every day,” says Johnson, “and I make sure she uses her body.”
“I have been raised with a lot of strong women in my life that help influence how I look at women,” he says, “which is as equal to a man.”
After the wall push-ups came push-ups on her knees. After that, push-ups with knees off the ground. That was when, Johnson gloats, “I could see the light in her eyes.” Sometimes she’ll go over twenty. Sometimes he has to protect her from herself on that too.
A few years ago, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, who described RBG as “frail” in one of his books on the court, learned the error of his ways in a pretty direct fashion. As in, Marty in his face, asking him, “How many push-ups can you do?” As Toobin struggled to come up with a number, Marty retorted, “My wife can do twenty-five—and you wrote that she was ‘frail.’”
Mostly he’s just happy that, he says, RBG hasn’t lost any bone density since they began training, which beats the odds for her age. “She fell in her chambers once, on her hip,” he said. “What happens to older women when they fall?” Johnson was referring to the fact that they often break bones. “She went to the doctor, came back, and said, ‘Nothing’s broken.’ That was my report card.”
THE NOTORIOUS RBG WORKOUT
“If I had any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva,” she said. “But sadly I have a monotone. And my grade school teachers were very cruel. They rated me a sparrow, not a robin.” She sings anyway—but “only in the shower, and in my dreams.”
IRIN: And when the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for? RBG: Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. —MSNBC interview, 2015
If it really was the midpoint of her tenure, she’d be retiring only a year older than John Paul Stevens did, at age ninety-one.
She died at 87
Technically, Kennedy aimed his advice at the five-years-younger Breyer too.
Breyer just announced his retirement during Biden’s presidency
