Justice Ginsburg: Confirmations Should Be Less Contentious
Justice Ginsburg receives the ABA Medal.
Video from ABANow.org.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appearing Monday before the ABA House of Delegates, called for a return to the less contentious U.S. Supreme Court confirmations that she experienced 17 years ago.
“May the Senate one day return to the collegial and bipartisan spirit that Justice [Stephen G.] Breyer and I had the good fortune to experience,” she said. Ginsburg was awarded the ABA Medal, the association’s highest honor.
“Without ABA support, I do not believe I would hold the good job I have today,” she told members of the House. She received the ABA’s highest rating when nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.
“That rating made me invulnerable to attack as unqualified for the appointment,” she said.
Ginsburg was involved in several ABA leadership posts before she joined the bench. She joined the ABA Journal Board of Editors in 1972—the same year she joined the faculty of Columbia Law School. In 1978, she joined a 12-person ABA delegation on a visit to China at a time the country was only just opening to outsiders.
ABA leaders determined “it would not do to present as representatives of the association only white men of a certain age,” she recalled. She agreed to keep a diary of the trip—on which she was the only person to have her own room—in return for copies of her colleagues’ photographs. The diary, “American Bar Association Visits the People’s Republic of China” was published in the October 1978 issue of the ABA Journal.
“I have lived long enough to see great changes in our profession, and I appreciate beyond reckoning” the ABA award, she said.
She is only the fourth woman to receive the honor. The others were Shirley M. Hufstedler, a former U.S. secretary of education and appellate court judge in both state and federal systems; Sandra Day O’Connor, former associate justice of the Supreme Court; and Patricia M. Wald, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993, after having served 13 years on the D.C. Circuit. Before her appointment as a federal judge, she was a professor at Columbia Law School and at Rutgers School of Law–Newark—the latter in the early 1960s, when there were only 20 female law professors in the country.
She also was general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, served on its national board, and was counsel to the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, coinciding with her teaching at Columbia. While active with the ACLU, she argued six cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and submitted briefs in 18 more.
She also held leadership positions in the American Law Institute, Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the Association of American Law Schools.
When she graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959, a Supreme Court justice refused to interview her for a clerkship because she was a woman, despite a glowing recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School.
