Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

Her response, she says, is to “try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”

call my crew” Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States No one would be confusing the three women for one another. Her new colleagues, RBG said happily, are no “shrinking violets.” For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: “When there are nine.”

She usually agrees to the concessions, even if the result won’t read exactly how it would if she were queen.

“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.

No one has ever doubted RBG’s work ethic. She used to be known for bringing a penlight to the movies to read her mail during previews, and to read briefs in the golf cart between strokes. As a child, her son would wake up in the middle of the night to find his mother scribbling away at legal pads spread across the dining room table, popping prunes.

She often quotes Learned Hand—the same judge who refused to hire her because he didn’t want to censor himself before a woman—that you shouldn’t knock your opponent’s chess pieces off the table.

“The important takeaway for them is not just ‘I lost.’ It should be ‘I was treated fairly and understand the judiciary.’”

“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,” RBG explained in 1993 to the in-house paper at the Supreme Court.

When they have children, she sends them “RBG grandclerk” T-shirts with the Supreme Court seal.

The case that helped turn RBG into a great dissenter was one she never liked talking about. Few of the justices relished discussing Bush v. Gore, the surreal and bitter case that put the fate of the U.S. presidency in their hands. “It was described as a circus, but that is an insult to the discipline of circuses,” said Theodore Olson, who represented then-Texas governor George W. Bush before the Supreme Court.

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.’”

Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent.

The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.

At oral argument, Ledbetter had watched RBG, alone among the men of the bench. “We were around the same age, and she too had been one of the first women to break into her profession,” Ledbetter later wrote. “I might have been on the factory floor as she walked the hallowed halls of the American justice system, but I imagined that men in ties and men in jeans can act just the same.”

Notably, the same denial of relief would occur if Ledbetter encountered pay discrimination based on race, religion, age, national origin, or disability. This is not the first time this court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose.

“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 persuaded her colleagues that a search has to be “reasonably related to the objectives of the search and not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.”

“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.”

RBG plainly adores Barack Obama. She calls him “sympathique,” a French word that is one of her highest forms of praise. And yet one night, Johnson remembers, RBG slipped out early from a dinner at the White House. After all, she had a date at the gym. “I said, ‘You left the president for me?’” Johnson recalls. “‘Oh man, extra push-ups for you.’”

Every once in a while, she would come to chambers wearing a turban, and her secretaries would warn the clerks, according to one of them, that it was a turban day, “so that we wouldn’t giggle when we saw her.”

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

Life after Marty has fallen into a kind of rhythm. In the old days, as she worked until the job was done, Marty would tell her that if she went to bed, in the morning everything would be clearer. “He was right,” RBG said after Marty’s death. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a maze, then go to sleep thinking about the way out, and when I wake up in the morning, I see the path. But now there’s no one telling me it’s time to quit.”

Asked what had been the most surprising thing about growing older, RBG was characteristically crisp. “Nothing surprised me. But I’ve learned two things. One is to seek ever more the joys of being alive, because who knows how much longer I will be living? At my age, one must take things day by day.”

RBG didn’t author the majority opinions that term that, to the great shock of liberals, left intact or even expanded major portions of progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. But as the conservative justices turned on one another, RBG was credited with keeping the liberals together and finding a way to get to a fifth or even sixth vote. She put aside fiery dissents for the time being. After all, this time, her side had a shot at actually winning, and RBG wants to get things done, not just make some noise.

“We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country,” RBG told me. An abortion ban, she said, only “hurts women who lack the means to go someplace else.”

RBG survived the indignities of pre-feminist life mostly by deciding that anger was counterproductive. “This wonderful woman whose statue I have in my chambers, Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy,” RBG says. “They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.’”

RBG always tells her clerks to paint the other side’s arguments in the best light, avoiding personal insults. She is painstaking in presenting facts, on the theory that the truth is weapon enough.

Back when many feminists were arguing that women spoke in a different voice, RBG observed the flaw in describing women as inherently different or even purer than men: “To stay uncorrupted, the argument goes, women must avoid internalizing ‘establishment’ values; they must not capitalize on opportunity presented by an illegitimate opportunity structure.”

Court has moved right, but my dissents get cites Born sinner, but definitely a winner Defending women’s rights cause unlike them, I’d been “her”

I’m blowing up the glass ceiling for good Call the chamber, same number same hood It’s all good

How many times must I tell you, Dear Mister Justice Scalia: You’d spare us such pain If you’d just entertain This idea . . . (Then you might relax your rigid posture.) You are searching in vain for a bright-line solution To a problem that isn’t so easy to solve— But the beautiful thing about our Constitution Is that, like our society, it can evolve. For our Founders, of course, were great men with a vision, But their culture restricted how far they could go, So, to us, I believe, they bequeath the decision To allow certain meanings to flourish—and grow.

This court has a history of getting Title VII wrong by not understanding that this law is supposed to help victims of discrimination, not hinder them. [Back]