Transcripts For CSPAN2 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg My Own Wo

I have a few more things. [laughter] for the past year at the library of congress, we have been celebrating changemakers, and i can think of a few people that fit the description and the United States Supreme Court justice liquidator ginsberg. [applause] [cheering] okay. Im going to hurry up. She is a hero and inspiration to so many of us. In fact, at 4 a. M. This morning, students from American University [cheering] camped out in front of this facility and they are here. Justice, are you going to talk about the graduation from Columbia Law School, spend mostt of the career advocating human rights and all these things and then recently was called the beyonce of jurisprudence. And she said i would rather use a jlo. [cheering] [laughter] without further ado, she is joined by her coauthors of the bestselling memoir, coauthors mary chi adjunct professor at georgetown law Wendy Williams Professor Emeritus at georgetown law, and her interviewer today and the interviewer the person that you know very well from n npr. [applause] [cheering] please be seated. I have to tell you before i leave the stage i want to shake your hand. [applause] [cheering] i want to give her a hug that would be very unprofessional. So, this is quite an amazing group, and i am very admiring of all the people that have been online for so many hours, and waiting to see the justice. There is a lot to see though she is a pretty little person. [laughter] so, how about a jlo the jlo, hod that happen . [laughter] i was called about a month or so ago by Jennifer Lopez and she said she would like to meet me and introduce beyonce and Alex Rodriguez so we had a very nice visit. She mostly wanted to ask if i had any secret about a happy marriage. Now they are traveling to concerts all over the world. Did you pass on your motherinlaws secret . On the days i was married she took me aside and said she wanted to tell me the secrets to have a happy marriage and i said i would be glad, what is it. Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf. [laughter] and unkind thoughtless word you just tune it out. [applause] instead of the chairman can you listen to justice ruth. Justice ginsburg, we know youve had some Health Challenges in the last year or. You had radiation for much of august. Let me ask you a question that everybody here wants to ask which is what are you feeling and how are you resting up for the term and do you plan on staying in your current job . As the audience can see, im alive. [applause] i am on my way to being very well. We have more than a month yet to go how do you just keep trucki trucking . For one thing, i love my job. Its the best and the hardest job ive ever had, and its kept me going through for cancer bouts. Instead of focusing on my aches and pains i have to somehow with what its going o is going on id concentrate on the coursework. So your book in my own words, it is the first essentially of two. I hesitate to ask this but im going to do it because i have 4,000 witnesses. Theyve been at work how many years . Fifteen years. 2004. It would be followed by selections and speeches and opinions that are written. When the expected i would be on the court for some time into the future so to make the book complete okay, lets flip the order. Lets have my selected writings first and then the biography. And it was a marvelous idea. You still havent said when. It keeps doing things and we are very happy about that. [applause] it will be the idea originally that it would strike the story of Justice Ginsburg before she was notorious. The. The chapter about antonin tobia. The chapter about the interviewers. There is a whole chapter about him in my own words and including Justice Ginsburg and justice alito. Everyone i think those about the unlikely friendship between the two and are interviewing Justice Scalia was a real treat for the buck and they interviewed him for the biography but parts of the interview are in my own words and has Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg are so different in so many ways, going into his chambers is very different. Justice ginsburg. I watched how he went from the kind of tough but we all know and lighten up how he felt about his good friend, ruth. He told several stories. One was when they travel to india together and they went to visit the tosh mall and Justice Scalia described how he watched Justice Ginsburg u listened to e tour guide described the love story behind the building of the taj mahal and he said he saw the tears start to stream from her eyes and as he told me that, im 90 sure i have a tear both related to the opinion. The other story he liked to talk about with parasailing the Justice Ginsburg when she was a young 70yearold was in need of the legal exchange. She turned to her husband and said that looks like fun. We should do that. He said are you crazy and if you do that i will remember you to our grandchildren. The host said i will go parasailing with you. So his wife was equally horrified and said if there is an accident and they can only save one of you, if that were not e it better not be you. They had to adjust the weight because they were normal sized human beings. [laughter] off they went and they went up and down into the water. Wendy and i asked about this experience a few years ago when we were interviewing her and said what was it like and Justice Ginsburg said it was marvelous and then she related it to a greek myth but we didnt get too close to the side. [laughter] was also a problem is when we took a ride to the pacifica graph of it. I explained. Justice ginsburg, youve always been a rather determined person. When you were in law school, your husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. The doctors told you the chances of survival were extremely slim. But the two of you just carried on and as we all know, he surprised. I thought people here might be interested in what your days and nights were like in that year and how in some ways it set up your sleep patterns for life. There was massive surgery followed by radiation. There was no chemotherapy in those days. We just took each day as it ca came. I had no takers. I wouldve been good enough for general, the hospital where he was coming in the afternoon. Until about midnight when whatever food he ingested that they. Then about 2 00 in the morning he was also dictating the paper and went to bed about two in the morning and that is when i get the book myself and in between there was a two and a halfyearold daughter. Thats how i became a night person. I appreciated that in those Early Morning hours, the telephone didnt bring, there were no emails in those days. It was a quiet time and i could concentrate. I hope that you are getting more than two hours these days. I do know that if you want to call the ginsburg residence, you do not on the weekend you do not call before noon. To some extent they take for granted for equality in the workplace, but that wasnt the case when you were a young lawyer. You couldnt get a job in the law firm and not one but two strikes against you. I was a woman and that was the hired very year that the killer is i had a 4yearold daughter when i graduated from law school. They would take a chance on a mother more than they were willing to risk. In your last year in law school you were tied for first place at Columbia Law School and a playing for clerkships. Tell us how you finally do get a clerkship because nobod nobody y and large interview you for the most part. Those were pre title seven days so they would say women are not welcome at this workplace, or we had a lady lawyer one. How many men have you had that didnt work i had a wonderful professor at Columbia Law School but later moved to stamford, gunther was in charge of columbia students and he called every federal judge in the second circuit. He was a columbia undergraduate, Law School Graduate and a waste of the clerks from columbia. He said i strongly recommend that you engage with with peter ginsburg. Will she be able to work on weekends and even on sunday. So the professor said if it doesnt work out, a young man in her class is going to jump in and take over. If you dont give her a chance, i will never recommend another columbia graduate. [applause] the big hurdle was to get that first job. Then she did it at least as well as the man so the second job wasnt the same obstacle. Theres a wonderful book what they mention it first and its about the biography of Sandra Day Oconnor. She was very high in her class at stanford law school. Maybe there would be a place as a legal secretary. So what did she do, she went to an attorney at is that i will work for you without pay for four months and then if you think im worth it, you can put me on the payroll. That is how she got her first job. That even after the clerkship, you couldnt get a job in the law firm. You ended up being a law profession. I could have gotten a job. I was going to a firm with a professor from columbia had said how would you like to write a book about the swedish judicial system . This is a part of her life that they will nobutthey will not gee discussed in the question that normally doesnt come up. Argues swedish by the way. Here i was in my 20s. I went from a College Dormitory to being married and i had the eat year itch. I wanted to see if i could manage on my own and the deal was i would go to sweden. My daughter would be taken care of by her father and when she finished school she came and joined me. It was a culture that i knew nothing about. She went back to sweden this year it was the anniversary of my degree and use software the picture. There were posters up and down the streets of one of the many events. We kept trying to see the poster looming through the streets and it was like that scene in the movie french kiss where they never seen the eiffel tower did you interview all of the justices and how often did you interview her . Before you ask that, but we told you they said inevitably people are going to write about your life, so why dont you be at your official biography people you really trust, and they certainly trusted wendy in the trenches when for the first time in history it became possible for the courts to accept the equal protection clause and they were equal and statute. [applause] the strategies were pretty much the same and she understood what we were trying to accomplish. When we came to her to talk about it and she sat us down at a little table and at th the tae there was a stack of documents and opinions and do the things and she said here is a Little Something that you might want to look at. Did you interview all of the justices that she served with . Between the two of you, you interviewed them all. We did. Some refused to be interviewed. There are some we still plan to interview. How often did you sit down with her for an extended interview . Im assuming it was a lot. Lee started out in that little moment in time after she was done with her summer and just before she had to prepare for the coming term and every year in august most often in the last week we sit down with her for three days in a row in the late afternoon. This year was a little different. We went up to new york where she was getting her radiation treatments. We sat with her twice and she remembered everything. She was perfectly normal except she was very tired. She wasnt letting it stop her and that was a new experience for us but then we came back down for one day so every year we do that and then we do a lot of things in between to keep track. Let me say this here in front of everybody. Justice brennan famously had an authorized biographer that got Writers Block after he died and somebody else eventually had to take over the project. I am saying to you you better not get Writers Block. To be able to read the product. Im taking for grantei am takint this is a very educated and curious audience. Im taking for granted everybody in this room has seen rbg at least once. So im not going to go through all of the cases in the strategy and all that of Justice Ginsburg. Theres other places where you are seeing this but theres also young people in the audience, men and women and i wanted to ask Justice Ginsburg in light of the fact and in light of the conversations we had about the balance between work and family life to tell us the story of the elevator scene. [laughter] my lively son when he was in the sixth grade. I called him wisely. His teachers called him hyperactive. I was called a threemonth to come down to the school to talk about my sons latest escapades. One day i was sitting in my office at Columbia Law School. The phone rang. It was the headmaster. They need to see you immediate immediately. I have been particularly weary that day because i stayed up all night writing a briefing. So i said this child has two parents. Please alternate calls, and it is his fathers turn. [applause] i was called and told your son stole the elevator. My Immediate Response was he stole the elevator . How far could he take it. It was one of those oldfashioned handheld elevators. The operator went out for a smoke and one of his classmates challenged him to take the kindergarten class up to the top floor. [laughter] who which he did. The calls came barely once a semester. There was a quick change in his behavior and the school was more reluctant to take a father away from his work than a mother so the suggestion to alternate calls did the trick. [applause] let me add that today she is a fine human. Because she wont do it, i will. There is a record that produces classical recordings. Okay. It would be inappropriate for you to do, but not for me. [laughter] lets talk about your time on the Supreme Court. Appointed by president clinton, and within three years of getting to the Supreme Court, you were still a very junior justice, you were assigned to write a Virginia Military Institute Case striking down their policy of exclusion of women. You would not have gotten that assignment before your female colleague, Justice Oconnor. Right . Doesnt already is very big in the workplace. So, Justice Oconnor would have been way ahead of me. As the chosen opinion writer. But they said ruth should write this opinion, and i got to write the decision in the Virginia Military Institute Case. So, you wrote in the case that most women, indeed most men would probably not want to meet the various demands. But those extraordinary individuals that can and want to meet those demands should be permitted to. So you were invited a little over a year ago i think to give a speech. How did that go . They invited me to come to the 20th anniversary of the position. My calendar was too crowded, so it turned out to be the 21st anniversary. And you were with me for that. The change in that school has been enormous. The Commanding Officer was so proud. They live in the same spot, but they were so enthusiastic. Many of them were in the engineering program. One wanted to be a scientist. They were able to upgrade the applicant pool. [applause] she left out a Ginsburg Scalia moment. To begin with, because Justice Scalia found her opinion outrageous and was very upset about the whole thing. The last sentence of the opinion said Something Like this is going to destroy. I asked Justice Ginsburg about that later and she said and this wasnt so long after the opinion. She said to me with the utmost confidence it will be a better place if there are women, and it wont be destroyed. But the wonderful thing about that was when we were there for the 21st anniversary, people were so proud and excited for Ruth Ginsburg they all stood up and applauded this and it was just remarkable. [applause] it also turned out to Justice Scalia was the sole detector of the case. Chief Justice Rehnquist didnt join my opinion but he did join Justice Thomas who was refused because his son attended so that segovia all alone scalia all alone. He knew i felt deeply about the case and it came to my chambers one day this is the ultimate draft of my dissent in the case. I am not ready yet to circulate to the court. The clock was ticking, and he wanted to give me as much time as he could. In late georgia on the plane he opened up his dissent and i was certainly glad to have the extra time to respond. When you get to the court, Justice Oconnor was of course the first woman justice. Shes been there for quite a while and as he would later learn youve got to be the only one for a while, to back. She was a reagan appointee and a girl of the west. You were a clinton appointee, you were from new york city. And i wondered, you very quickly established a special bond. She was as close as i came to having a big sister. When i came on board she gave me some advice, not too much. She didnt want to douse me with excessive information, just what i needed to know to navigate those first few weeks. Then Justice Oconnor had a mastectomy and was on the bench nine days after the surgery and was going to tell me how to manage this. You scheduled chemotherapy that way you can get over it during the weekend and be