Yesterday, I was able to attend a lecture at the Law School by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I had the privilege of seeing Chief Justice Rehnquist when he was here in 1999, and so was glad I was able to take the time to see Justice Ginsburg.
First of all, she is a very tiny woman, which I found surprising, since in my mind Supreme Court Justices are larger than life. Although the pictures I have seen of her always look severe, so smiled quite often through her lecture, and made multiple funny comments.
Her lecture was on the role of women and the law, and how far women have progressed on the bench and in the bar.
She opened her lecture with a remembrance of Chief Justice Rehnquist, who she seemed to admire very much, and whom, she said, strived to keep debate and discussion civil between the Justices.
Talking about the advances that women have made in the legal profession, she spoke of how the profession of law was felt to be an unfit occupation for a woman, yet Pallas Athena, the Greek Goddess of wisdom and war, as also the goddess of Justice, and was behind the trial of Orestes. She also spoke of Jewish law, and of Debora (I apologize if I have spelled this incorrectly) who was only one of three to hold her legal position, the other two being Moses and Samuel.
The she spoke of women in the legal tradition in the United States. In the 1960s, only 3% of lawyers were women. Today, 23% of tenured law faculty are women, which is an improvement, however from this we can conclude that women have still not reached equity.
Although President Truman considered appointing a woman to the Supreme Court, he decided that the time was not yet right, and it was not until Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor that the first woman sat on the Supreme Court. However, President Carter was the first president to appoint women to the federal bench with any regularity. He appointed 40 women to the federal bench, while previous presidents had appointed only one or two women. Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush each appointed a significant number of women, and President Clinton appointed 108 women. In contrast the current president has appointed less than 40 women so far. (She gave the actual numbers but I didn’t write it down fast enough.)
Despite accounting for more than 50% of the population, women still make up for only 1/4 of the federal judiciary, although 48 out of 50 states have women on the court of last appeal. In contrast, she mentioned that in Canada, the Chief Justice of their Supreme Court is a woman, and 4 of their 8 Justices are women.
This is something that needs to be addressed, because our system of justice is richer when there is a diversity on the court.
The closed her lecture with an appreciation of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
She gave a brief question and answer period following the lecture, and the issue she addressed that I found most interesting was the Kelo case. She said that she was very glad the the legislatures were addressing the subject of eminent domain, and that the Court’s ruling was that the Court should have no say in what are essentially state and local matters.
In addressing the issue of religion and religious tolerance in the court, she spoke of how the separation of church and state in the US has benefited both churches and the state.
She closed her remarks discussing how opinion goes back and forth in the United States, as times change, and said that “the symbol of the US isn’t the bald eagle. It is the pendulum.”
