Judith Davidson Moyers Women of Spirit Lecture with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

good evening everyone I'm serene Jones and I am tonight the extremely proud president of Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York and it is my honor to welcome you to the ninth judith davidson warriors women of spirit lecture and especially my honor to welcome you along with our esteemed woman of mighty spirit Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg a special welcome to all the Union faculty and students and administrators and trustees who are here and to our newly affiliated Episcopal Divinity School partners I want to say a special hello to all of you who are in or the overflow room in 207 and we have a lot of people watching online so let us know your watching by using the hashtag RBG women of spirit I'm also particularly happy to welcome the chair of unions board William Candelaria and our beloved chair emeritus will cut Dunham's I also want to begin by extending a warm welcome to our community friends and neighbors from this neighborhood and a special warm welcome for those of you who are here at Union for the first time will all of you please join us at the end of this evenings program for a reception in the back of the chapel and I ask that you turn off your phones and as requested would you please refrain from taking pictures and just sit back and enjoy being here because you were here tonight in a very special place it is a small but mighty place Union Theological Seminary a little bit about our history we were founded in 1836 by a small group of radical this evening I'll call them notorious clergy who left behind the quiet halls of their seminaries up the road in New Haven and down the road in Princeton and they came to New York City and set up tents on the docks downtown to start a whole new kind of seminary they ardently believed that if ministers were going to be strong public voices for good in this nation they needed to be educated in a place where all parts of the nation gather and for them that was the teeming messy diverse center called New York City now little did these founders know that this unlikely tempt of a seminary would quickly rise to become the preeminent Theological Seminary in the world for almost 200 years this place has earned that acclaim by bringing together the best theological minds of each generation Dietrich Bonhoeffer Reinhold Niebuhr James cone Katie cannon just to mention a few and supporting these teachers union has educated generations of impassioned smart and brave students who time and again have risen to the challenge of being the moral and spiritual leaders of this great land you find union graduates and students in soup kitchens and in Congress you'll find them on the streets working with the formerly incarcerated and also as sitting judges in some of our courts our nation's highest courts you'll find them around the world leading some of the most important social movements of the 20th 20th and 21st century in South Africa India China and in all of the ongoing civil rights movements here in this nation to make this more real let me give you a sense of what this mission has meant just in the past month alone at Union this past week we watched with pride as one of our present students Joshua Brian Campbell appeared at the Oscars as a nominee for the composition of the Best Original Song along with Cynthia Aveo who sang it at the awards the beautiful stand up [Applause] the theme song to the motion picture Harriet in Georgia just days ago one of our trustees and alums the senior pastor of Martin Luther King's historic urban easer Baptist Church in Atlanta announced a run for the u.s. sentence sentence in it this past Saturday one of our graduates became the first lesbian woman to be consecrated bishop in the Episcopal Church she followed the first woman and first african-american to become bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado last May who was also a union alum this list could go on including all of those graduates who right now are working in small struggling rural parishes or on the border in Juarez or in community organizations around the nation helping people learn what it means to love to do justice and take care for our precious earth today at Union this includes not only Christian students but also students in our Buddhist and our Islamic study programs and Jewish students seeking out us in partnership with Jewish Theological Seminary right across the street also one third of our students of our student body is comprised of unaffiliated students the spiritual but not religious who now make up the largest denomination if they were a denomination in our country we are proud here that the religious and spiritual diversity of our nation and our broader world is reflected in our classes and our community what brings this remarkable indeed it's not a stretch to say unmatched diversity of students to this place it's quite simply what we teach our motto is Union for scholarship and faith come together to reimagine the work of social justice here we study big questions what's the purpose of our lives our meaning how are we supposed to live together what are the big stories those deeply spiritual stories we tell ourselves about who we are we study the big why but also the urgent how and it's not just an intellectual endeavor although it is that it's also a place where the ongoing planetary and human struggle for justice remains at the center of every big question and every small or a big answer we offer ethical formation and we train moral leaders ready to engage our world because you see we realize here that in this nation we are called to uphold values like equality freedom and justice but these things aren't something that just come naturally to us as human beings it has to be cultivated and it is cultivated here at Union these values are taught taught in a way that they take up residence not just in our heads but in our bones in our hearts and our very being and it is that depth from which Springs those rare things called moral courage and moral imagination you can't take these things for granted to teach this is our singular calling as you could see when you stepped on the campus we're in the middle of a massive renovation of our entire physical plant creating new classrooms dormitories gathering spaces worship spaces media labs offices research centers Institute spaces that will allow us to boldly continue this work far into the 21st century we're undergoing a physical renaissance the scope of which we have not seen in a hundred years and even more profound is the renaissance of vision and imagination happening in our halls it is for such a time as this that this place has been called friends such an education has never been more important and tonight all of you join us in this sacred justice-seeking endeavor now there are a few in our community that demonstrate all that union stands for more than Judith and Bill Moyers ten years ago I remember it very well Bill Moyers started this lecture series in honor of Judith's 75th birthday the lecture is one of a kind in that it honors global women leaders who have been deeply shaped by spiritual values and faith this evening you all are here and you know that no one better represents this extraordinary legacy than Judith Davidson warriors a church-going Texan by birth Judith his life has been one long extended example of what a woman of spirit does her prestigious awards are too numerous to name her work in higher education has been constant in diligent her leadership role as the president of public affairs television the critical role that she played in the programs and documentaries the voluminous programs and documentaries produced by her and bill programs calling us to conscience exciting moral courage Judith mother and grandmother were so happy that all three of her children are with us tonight she is indubitable a constant source of energy innovative ideas and vision she and bill are recipients of union's highest award the Union Medal and the crowning achievement as I see it was her vital service on union's own board of trustees her heart is big her mind is brilliant her faith is deep and undaunted and her arms are strong enough to hold the breath of our humanity would you join me in welcoming a true woman of spirit Judith Davidson thank you so much at ole serene just this minute that's a little over the top it has been my pleasure for 10 years now to suggest to serene and the Dean and the faculty which of the millions of women of spirit we should invite to come to Union all over the globe women continue to take action to change the world here at Union especially you know it's been generations now where students have combined scholarship and activism in the past ten years we have had fabulous women here for this women of spirit honor you have the list it's in this and so I'm not going to call their names which breaks my heart because usually I do and take time with each one which you'll see but don't do it right now each of these women has taken action in different spheres climate change the environment poverty human rights labor organizing politics and reform of our criminal justice system one even by writing Pulitzer prize-winning novels and essays I was Marilyn Robinson tonight we're honored to bring you a very special guest to be in conversation with journalist Bill Moyers you all know Bill it's almost fifty years in television and his forty Emmy Awards so I don't need to say any more I could believe me we've been married 65 years and I worked with him closely every day for 30 years and we're still married my under action will be brief because we all want to hear from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg very few Americans in our history can match the role she has played does play in our democracy when she went to the Harvard Law School she was only one of nine women and there were five hundred men and she had to have her classwork of course and she also juggle being a wife and mother at all school she faced resistance from some faculty and administrators but she became the first female on the Harvard Law Review her late husband Martin Ginsburg came down with cancer while they were still in law school and she attended his classes as well as hers and took those notes and tack those papers for both of them she had to transfer for her final year and came to Columbia Law School no surprise she rose to the be at the top of her class however after graduation it wasn't easy for a woman to get a job in a law firm you'll hear more about that she did law research and finally she had a faculty position at the Rutgers Law School later she became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School there while directing the women's rights project of the ACLU she took six landmark cases on gender equality to the Supreme Court President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the DC Court of Appeals where she served for 13 years and in 1993 President Clinton appointed her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Wow only the second woman to take the bench both at the court of appeals and the Supreme Court she is famished there what was such effect that there was such a thing as sex discrimination that had not been established and that that violated the Constitution this changed the landscape of gender-based law throughout her career she is championed the equal citizen stature constantly reminding all that the Constitution protects the rights of everyone at the Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg has also been a force for consensus building balance and decency she's proved she has provided a strong voice of dissent from conservative majority opinions for example rebuking the majority's willful demolition her words willful demolition of the Voting Rights Act she continues to inspire us and protect us and we thank her as a woman of spirit it's my honor to welcome Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thank you lissa sound and that that is just the Republican caucus welcome indeed as you can see Justice Ginsburg it's a full house here to greet you the chapel is packed with union faculty staff administration friends guests have come from the Jewish Theological Seminary across the way and from the religion departments of Barnard and Columbia your law school alma mater still more in the balcony yonder and in a room you and I can't see the overflowing room it's overflowing and many are joining us by streaming so the union communion community has gathered and we thank you very much for coming first a personal note two weeks ago Judith and I were at the library of commerce on the Library of Congress the LBJ Foundation was presenting the Justice with its annual liberty and justice award for all and they had asked me to do a brief tribute to the Justice so I spent weeks plunging into her work the books about of the biography biographies the most recent and excellent book called conversations with RB G which is just out and as a terrific book and especially her briefs I have read briefs in my life but never as many briefs as I have read in the last three months and what I discovered in both the dissenting briefs and the affirming briefs is a remarkable style a remarkable body of prose that is lean and muscular as if it been in with a first-rate trainer for the last thirty years and that was picturesque and descriptive and and insightful I never enjoyed reading anything legal as much as I did those briefs and then I discovered a little-known fact about her maybe some of you do who know her well personally but she had studied West I studied European literature at Cornell in the 50s with Vladimir Nabokov and he had obviously had reportedly head and substantially had an impact on this unusual remarkable visible and particular prose so in your spare time I urge you to get those briefs I'm going to mention a few of them a little later and read them they are remarkable literature so I want to begin by asking you Justice Ginsburg what did you take away from that time with neighbour cough that you feel definitely shifted your way of writing we called him Nabokov the various pronunciations he was a man who was in love with the sound of words I think English was his third language his first language was French and then Russian and he explained why he liked writing in English better than better than other languages and he gave his example the white horse well if you say it in French it's the shovel Blanc but when you say shovel you see a brown horse you have to adjust your image to make it white but because we put the adjective first when the horse comes it's already white [Laughter] is it true that he influenced your using the phrase gender discrimination instead of sex discrimination and that you made the change that change was brought about by my secretary at Columbia Law School Millicent Ryan was her name she said to me one day I've been typing these briefs and articles for you and the word sex just just out all over don't you know that the men you are addressing because the federal bench was then virtually all-male don't you know that their first association with the word sex is not what you want to be on their minds so choose a gender neutral word a grammar book term and that will ward off distracting associations I saw I saw it that she was so right and I began to use gender-based discrimination and the court picked it up too so now you will see gender used did you ever think of giving up law for novels did you ever think of becoming a novelist after that experience I loved the law I loved the study of law unlike many law students I thoroughly enjoyed my three years in law school I don't think I have enough capacity to be a good novelist but in the trade I have been in father goodness knows how many is it's hard to believe I've been on the Supreme Court for 27 years did you have do you have in your head how many briefs you have written how many opinions yes appears hundreds and hundreds because I was before I was on the Supreme Court I was for thirteen years on the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit I in those 13 years I wrote hundreds of opinions and on the Supreme Court I I don't have an accurate count of them but there is a record of how many and they're in in the hundreds there's an opinion of the court in every case but then every justice is free to write separately either a concurring opinion joining in the majority's judgment but for different reasons or a dissenting opinion and I you perhaps notice the difference between an opinion that speaks for the court and our conferences I'll take careful notes of what my colleagues thought about a case and if I have assigned the opinion I will try to incorporate other views because I'm writing for the court but if I'm writing in dissent I don't have to worry about what the others so I have a free hand well if you had become a novelist we did miss some marvelous opinions and I'm so glad I had that chance to read them but it takes me back to the question why did you become a lawyer goes back to my undergraduate days at Cornell University it was not a great time for our country it was the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin there was a tremendous Red Scare in the country it was the house on American Activities Committee and comparable investigating committee hauling people many of them in the entertainment business of writers having them come before Congress to try to justify why they had belonged to a pink tinge organization in their youth in the 1930s at the height of the depression I had a great professor for constitutional law at Cornell his name was Robert Cushman and he wanted me to be aware that our country was strained from its most basic values that is the right to think speak and write as you believe and not as a big brother government tells you is the right way to think speak and write and he made me aware that there were lawyers standing up with his people reminding our Congress that we had a first amendment that guarantees freedom of expression we have a Fifth Amendment protecting us against self-incrimination I drew from that that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing to be because you could earn a living but you could also do things for which you were not paid that would make make conditions a little better in your community so it was that idea of a lawyer is more than someone who works for a day's pay but someone who has a skill that can help make things a little better that there runs through your life and your work deep moral thread a moral imperative where does that come from where they did I don't know in particular where you do that from but I have often quoted an expression that Martin Luther King was fond of and that is that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice and I believe that fervently I've seen it in my own lifetime things may not be now as we would like them to be but think of how far we have come for example I grew up when world war ii was raging and we were fighting a war against odious racism and yet our own troops until the very end of the war were rigidly separated by a race that was wrong and i think world war ii was a major contributor to the supreme court eventually ending apartheid in america with the brown v board decision 1954 yes 54 but do you think of the way things were the racial injustice that existed in our country the confined opportunities open to women so much was it was the closed door era for women and I have seen those doors open wide I've seen what was once the closed door replaced by a welcome match mat so I am an optimist because I know that there is the possibility of change if people really care to make it happen and that's important because I never could have done what I did if there hadn't been a groundswell among women and in the late 60s and throughout the 70s wanting to tear down the barriers wanted to free both women and men to be you and me to follow your own talents as far as they could take you when I asked you that question about that moral imperative I thought you were perhaps going to come back with something about the Hebrew prophets I did my graduate work in theology and church history and the only courses I came close to flunking were two years of Hebrew if I hadn't been married to Judith I would never have come out of it but I did spend enough time with that to think I heard in some of your opinions that cadence of the Prophet that that outrage that comes with the sight of injustice and and I found where you said after you took the oath at the Supreme Court I am a judge born raised and proud of being a Jew the demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition I hope in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States I will have the strength and courage to remain constant in the service of that demand when I read that I realized that explains the biblical command on the wall that just wasn't in your chamber is it still in your chain it's from Deuteronomy yes its justice justice shall thou pursue that thou may shrubs right yes and it also what I came away with from my Jewish heritage is a love of learning learning is highly prized among Jews my father came here from Russia when he was 13 he went to night school to learn English he never had any formal education except Hebrew school in any country my mother was the first child in her large family to be born in the USA education was tremendously important to them and I grew up learning to love to read my fondest memories as a child was sitting on my mother's lap while she read to me so the SS the opposition to injustice and wanting to do something about it there's a Jewish expression about the obligation to help repair tears in the society in which we in which we live I came upon an editorial you wrote in your high school paper I believe in which you did an amazing this account of the importance of the Magna Carta but the 10 commandments first the Magna Carta the 1680 191 Bill of Rights in England the Declaration of Independence which marked the framework for a new government and the UN Charter that was enough didn't how how did you at that age bring those documents together and what's a brief but remarkable exposition it was in the 8th grade world war ii who had just ended and there was great optimism there was an organization with a name something like the world Federalists everyone was hoping for this one world that would live at peace and that the rule of long wins take over and it hasn't worked out quite as well as the expectation of time but it was very very hopeful time in the UN Charter was the idea of one world at peace was alive it didn't take too long before the iron curtain came down and we began what endured for so many years but you were optimistic despite the fact that you were born in the midst of the depression you were born in 33 yes I was born in 34 Judith was born in 35 so we've got between us two hundred fifty some odd years and it was after the depression and after World War two I think both of us were quite optimistic then even though we were too young to know what optimism was but we were hopeful about about the future but something else I almost brought it tonight and I thought it would take too long so that was in the eighth grade was that in high school then you came upon that writing by Anne Frank in which she and I'd never seen this before I've read her diary seen the documentaries but she talks about plight of women yes and why women are taking the the subordination to men she says it's stupid yes he says it's stupid and she says I can only explain it by the fact that well men are more physical men do the work and men can do as they please and something like that and then she said I just hope women will wake up one day and realize what's been done to them and do something about it and she was 15 years old 15 years of these where did you find that it's it's in the diary toward the end it was one of the last entries before she was sent off to I think bergen-belsen know where she died I think about a month short of her 16th birthday can you remember what you thought when you read that about women in Anne Frank's diary I don't remember the first time I encountered it because I read the Diary Diaries a few times but it was a real eye-opener I knew that these situations these conditions existed but I thought well that's just the way it is there's not much you can do about it you don't have to cope with it but that's that's a remarkable entry in her diary and she knows she mentions some progress too she said in some countries they've been given equal rights mm-hmm things were better right but for women who were your role models when you were a young girl I know it was one was your mother Celia I had a fictional role model and a a real one might rewrite that my mother was constant encourages telling me be independent whatever else you do it would be nice if you met and married Prince Charming but be prepared to fend for yourself the fictional heroine was Nancy Drew for most books with children at that time of the chain and jock variety where Jack was running in doing all kinds of fun things and Jane or Jill was sitting in a pretty pink party dress but Nancy Drew was a doer she was leading around her boyfriend she had adventures she solved mysteries the real woman who was at the heroine for me was Amelia Earhart I can't say that I had women judges as a model except for Deborah in the Bible because women weren't on the bench I mean even when I started law school women were only 3% of the lawyers across the country I think young women today have many women who inspire them women there's no closed doors for women anymore when we can be Admirals they can be chief judges so it was Nancy Drew and a million what about the Greek deities oh yes my mother took me bleep trips to the library and while she got her hair done I would pick out the five books I'd take home and Greek mythology I loved my closest friend growing up was Catholic and she had all these Saints and I had nothing but this one what God so so that's that's when I became a lover of Greek mythology Athena in particular I believe Pallas Athena who gave her father a headache she is said to have I was struck by this when I came across it because when I was about that age growing up in a small town in these Texas walking down East Bergesen Street they had just opened the new small library built by the business and professional women they our first real external library outside of the courthouse and I went and I picked out two books to take home first books that I'd ever had one was Jules Verne's around the world in 80 days and the other was a book of Greek heroes and about the same time you were reading about Athena I was reading about the males who were often the object of their wrath so I we have that in common that framed an issue with me Jules Verne in in in in enhanced my desire to be a journalist go so you travel the world and did it on somebody else's expense account like that but Athena was said to have established the rule of law when she tried arrest us right for the murder of her for the for the murder and after the murder of her mother who had killed his father and so she was said to have put down the first frame for the rule of justice and I wondered if he saw something in the future for you because of that I did not think of me being a judge because there may have been Athena but she was immortal there was no mortal in fact it wasn't until Jimmy Carter became president that women showed up on the federal bench in numbers go back to when I was in law school that had been just one women woman in the entire history of the country who had ever served on a federal appellate bench she was Florence Allen from Ohio she retired in 1959 the year I graduated from law school and there were none again until Johnson Johnson appointed Shirley Hufstedler to the Ninth Circuit and then Carter made Shirley Hostetler the first ever Secretary of Education they went on again Hatta thought I've seen these federal judges they all look just like me so he was determined to appoint members of minority groups and women in numbers to the federal bench there was no vacancy on the Supreme Court he had only four years in office but he transformed the federal judiciary he named I think over 25 women to district court trial court benches and then 11 to courts of appeals and I was one of the lucky eleven then President Reagan takes office and he doesn't want to be outdone so he is determined to put the first woman on the Supreme Court he made an earth nationwide search and came up with a brilliant choice and in Saturday O'Connor and no president has gone back to the not-so-good old days so women are now something like close to a third of the federal bench not enough but it's certainly moved in the in the right direction let me take half a step back and then we're going to move on to some matters of law but you grew up in Flatbush in Brooklyn Flatbush it at one time it was one of the original Brooklyn colonies in in the old days and then it became by the time you came along the largest concentration of urban Jewish people in the world believe it or not mixing it up with the Irish the poles the Italians and some Syrians and there is a in your biography and other accounts of Flatbush in the 30s and 40s a sense of energy and drive and you know some conflict obviously when people are that many people are aspiring for their daily bread but you lived near Coney Island and you could see across the way I'm told the Statute of Liberty there was something that one writer called a thorough Americanists about Flatbush did you sense that did you get the patriotic vibrations and and the jostling that was taking place in the country around that time most of the people in my neighborhood and their parents either came from the old world certainly no further back than that grandparents uh neighborhood as many in New York it was about evenly divided among Jews Italians and Irish and then as you said there was a smattering of other what it wasn't just in our neighborhood were african-americans and even when I went to law school I think it was mentioned that I was one of nine women in a class of over 500 in that same class with nine women there's only one african-american in the entire Harvard Law School first-year class just one just one well I lived in a small town in Texas grew up 20,000 people 10,000 black and 10,000 white and rarely did the Twain interact we saw each other from a distance but it proved as I've said many times that you could grow up well loved well taught and well churched and still not know anything about the lived experience of someone else just across the tracks right you might know of a face named sweat against painter when it came to Texas finally realized it couldn't exclude african-americans from the legal education so it set up I think in the 40s a separate school separate and vastly unequal that decisions what against painter was one of the building blocks leading to Brown be bored because the Supreme Court said without overturning Plessy against Ferguson that introduced the separate but equal notion these schools are vastly unequal african-americans cannot be kept out of the University of Texas law school so I was living in Brooklyn when Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson to be on the Dodgers and that was such an exciting time we had no idea of what this man was exposed to not only from other teams but his own teammates I have a passion for opera you never saw an african-american on an opera stage there was Marian Anderson great contralto she wasn't allowed to sing in DC in Constitution Hall finally the men engaged her when she was well past her prime so although we were a melting pot of people from Europe both Eastern and West their African Americans did not live in the same neighborhood well I cheered your to say your opinion and I think it was Fisher versus the University of Texas because it was an affirmative action case and we in the Johnson administration has pushed affirmative action until we got a significant backlash but LBJ made one of the greatest speeches of his time in politics at Howard University when he kidding when he he said how can we say that if we tie people on top people who've been running with their feet tired and bring them to the starting line they can keep up with everybody else who has never been tied and yet in Fisher versus the University of Texas I believe correct me if I'm wrong you wrote and that's our University Judith and mine you wrote that if a university wants to adopt a modest or moderate affirmative action program why not it was just I love the way you phrase it as if it were just a natural thing not some great mountain that had been moved do you remember that yes yeah it had a big impact of course in Texas but starting with caldron where you grew up and your Idol your heroes and your reading and your parents and your experience at Cornell let's I want to go I want to take you to the Voting Rights Act that I have mentioned that Judith mentioned in her introduction I was there in the White House with LBJ when he signed the Voting in 1965 the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement to that moment everyday people had put down their lives for it and the main blow that we struck with the law was aimed at states and counties that had done their worst to keep black citizens from voting Mississippi for example would ask black people coming to vote how many bubbles in a bar of soap and they had to answer it before they could vote Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by an overwhelming margin and it worked Congress renewed it four times under President Nixon Ford Reagan and the first George Bush but 48 years later after LBJ had signed it the conservative majority on the court struck down key provisions of the Act by a five to four vote I will never forget because that was the case before the court that was the closest to my heart and experience I will never forget the fiery dissents you wrote describing discrimination against voters a vile infection and denouncing what you call the demolition of the Voting Rights Act you predict it if you will remember in that opinion that bad things would come from it in the form of new and more sophisticated discrimination and they have this year stringent ID laws and new and more sophisticated purges of the voter rolls the early closing of polls moving polls to out-of-the-way places hard to reach the majority's opinion in that case Justice Jennifer Ginsburg has done enormous harm do you think that justices know this - I think they know it yes but the majority place to blame elsewhere well perhaps we should explain the mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 states that had kept african-americans from the poles were put under a preclearance system that meant if they wanted to make any change at all in their voting laws they would have to have it pre-cleared by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice or a three-judge District Court in the District of Columbia that meant that these repressive restrictive laws never got passed because the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division would say no we won't be clear this their majority's view was Voting Rights Act in 1965 we're now two thousand something the formula is obsolete because some of the places that discriminated in the past some of the cities some of the counties are now up to snuff so they shouldn't be under the system so Congress redo the formula so the people subject to preclearance are the ones who deserve to be who are still discriminating against African American voters well the stark reality political reality here's a Congress that had the Voting Rights Act had been recently renewed when the case came to the court what member of Congress was going to stand up and say my district or my county or my city or my state is still discriminating so keep us under the preclearance system it wasn't going to happen it wasn't going to be a new formula the act itself had again out free mechanism that is if you had a clean record for X number of years you could bail out and you would no longer be subject to the preclearance system so Congress saw the problem it had provided the bailout which I thought it was the right way to do it the political reality was you the Congress was not going to pass a new formula and I did say this this is of all that really worked that preclearance system worked and it was it was not it didn't come later it came immediately as soon as the the heart of the Act was declared unconstitutional you started to see these restrictive measures the ones that you mentioned and in the polling early in the day put them in faraway places voter IDs if I may just hours after the court issued yes judge but Texas the legislature of Texas passed a severe ID Oh at the same day just I was after that my friend Don Reeves called me and said well it started what started the reversing the the he would have said the arc is being pushed back the other direction and you anticipated that was this some intuition you know it was almost certain that that was going to happen but the majority blamed Congress said this is legislation the Legislature should fix the statute so that it fits the contemporary scene and not the scene in 1965 that was that was the courts view the case was decided when Obama was president at a time when many Americans thought we were living in a post-racial America and we've been disabused of that notion in the past few years I want to ask you do you think that if the opportunity came again especially in the light of the bad fruit that which he that yielded that this decision yielded that the court might reconsider your crystal ball is as good as mine I can only say I hope so you know when I wrote that dissent I was hoping that I could peel off one person from the majority didn't didn't work didn't work out there but every time I read it dissent hope springs eternal everything that I keep sounding the theme very quickly what are the circumstances under which a court can recent reconsider the court can recent consider a case this case will not be reconsidered because the law is off the books now declared unconstitutional so so it would be up to Congress and I have no hope at all that the current Congress would redo the Voting Rights Act that makes two of us it will not surprise you of course that the people here tonight are deeply engaged with with religion in democracy so I'd like to talk briefly about that you have been a staunch defender of the separation of church and state why is that been so important to you I think that religion is stronger when it's separate when government isn't entangling itself with the religion I should say that the wall to be frank no longer exists that the current court has a different notion of what the religion clauses the Establishment Clause Free Exercise Clause what they mean and the notion is the state must be neutral among religions so an example if there's a state support of Catholic parochial schools it must be support for Jewish day schools as well so the state can't pick and choose it can have no preferred religion but it's no longer the doctrine that the government must keep its hands off the church by not funding church sponsored activities for a long time the Court recognized that the full of religious freedom Liberty should be a shield to protect the exercise of religion but it shouldn't be weaponized as a license to discriminate so help us understand those of us here tonight the moral balancing act that the court engages in when reviewing a case where say you're free exercise of religion collides with my free exercise of religion because we believe differently or one of us may not believe at all and and I'm going to come to the I don't I'm not asking you to comment on any pending case but come to the Hobby Lobby decision in just a moment what what do you all consider and as you try to balance these forces of church and state in your conferences one is if we exercise the government should not interfere what someone's free exercise and then those cases are still I think solid there was one case in involving I don't know we remember the name of the church but they had animal sacrifice and and and the court allowed that that free exercise now you can go to extreme there was a case when I was on the Court of Appeals the church was called the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church that had a as its sacrament marijuana but it was not just in church on a Sunday it was all day every day and so this church wanted to be licensed to import as much marijuana as it please so the members of his congregation could smoke marijuana all day every day I was surprised that that turned out to be a two-to-one decision I wrote the decision saying no but there was one of my colleagues who said if that's their belief if that's the sacrament we lost a passion you delivered another stinging dissent in the Hobby Lobby case that's when the conservative majority on the court by five-to-four decision ruled that because of their religious beliefs the Christian owners of the company Hobby Lobby do not have to provide insurance coverage for birth control and contraceptives and you call that decision a startling breath why that choice the owners free exercise right their belief was something that I respect but they had a workforce of people who were not of the same belief and the federal law guaranteed to women in insurance insurance coverage had to cover contraceptives and that the owners had a belief that contraception is sinful they could have that belief and as long as only co-religionists worked for them it would be fine because the women wouldn't ask for it but they were employing women who were a different belief religious based or not it the owners are in business in commerce they have to abide by the rules that govern everybody and should not be in a position of thrusting the way they believe on a workforce that doesn't share their beliefs that wasn't so you said the court I fear has walked into a minefield that was it was understood that if you were engaged in a business selling to the public you couldn't for example say I don't want to sell to Jews or I don't want to sell to african-americans you're in business your business has to be open to all people who want access to the facilities that's very reasonable legislation to adopt and that's the way it had been until through Hobby Lobby giving the owner the prerogative there were many many cases along the way where there was a deeply held religious belief but it couldn't be accommodated think of the Orthodox Jews who said we'd like to remain open on Sunday because we must close on Saturday that case came to the Warren Court and they rejected the plea from the Orthodox Jews that they should be allowed to open on Sunday when all their competitors were closed well I grew up in this small town I was telling you about members of my church owned two drug stores with with soda fountains in them and both of them believed that it that segregation was ordained by the Bible and that they didn't have to serve the black people of our town who came in and that prevailed up until the 60s when we passed the Civil Rights Act of 65 which we talked about last week so in effect and just on that subject would like to speak about a woman who came to be a role model for me although we were both adults in fact she was I think in one of the first groups of Episcopal ministers to be ordained her name is Paula Murray Polly was attending Howard law school in the middle 40s all of the lunch places surrounding Howard University were white only palling in the 40s organized the Howard students to sit in at those lunch places and all of the lunch places around Howard changed to admit that Howard students that was pauly in the 40s before Howard she was attending Hunter College here in the city and she took one of her friends a white woman to go with her to visit her family in North Carolina across the mason-dixon line party is told to go to the back of the bus she refuses and she's arrested in the 40s long before we return Rosa Park and she was she wrote an article that was a major influence on me and other women in the 70s it was called crow Jane crow and the law yeah and in which she spoke about all the barriers the artificial barriers that stand in the way of women being able to achieve what their talent and hard work would allow them to achieve she is finally I think one of the one of the residences at Yale where she got her divinity degree in has been named there was the name of a southern slave owner on the building and now it's it's named after Pauli Murray but she was a woman way ahead of their time so Michele Alexander if you're here you have your next book Jane crow right but I I hey Jane Doe has been written by Rosalyn Rosenberg it's it's this story it's a fire of you Polly I love what you told Jeffrey Rosen and Jeffrey Rosen was your collaborator in this new book conversation with RBG oh let's see love law the other two Liberty is something else but you've said to him quote and this reminds me of that thin that lean muscular prose that you I think must have developed at Cornell Hobby Lobby was in business for profit it employed hundreds of women who did not share those religious beliefs so if you're going to employ people a diverse workforce you cannot force your belief on the people's who work for you if that's a choice you want to make if you want to be in business then you have to play by the rules that all other businesses play by and you can't disadvantage the people who work for you based on your belief which they do not share but we lost this round you lost Ms Brown and I was reminded that you had said elsewhere that the core has to be careful to see that Congress is not treading on our most fundamental human values but I ask you who is going to see that the court does not tread on our fundamental values the people who have controversies that will come before the court the lawyers who will represent them the commentators on the cases that the court will hear We the People it has to start with we the people there was a great jurist although never on the Supreme Court he's I think universally recognizes one of the great u.s. jurist of all time learn at hand who said if Liberty is lost in the hearts of men and women no court can restore it so every almost every major change that we have seen has been the result of a groundswell of people saying what we have is not right it needs to be changed things of how the gay rights movement changed when people came out of the closet and said this is who I am I'm proud of it the change was was Swift after that but when people were hiding who they were nothing was happening I remember when the civil rights movement for which so many everyday people had died in the South and elsewhere fortunately met with this deep thirst a political but in Washington Congress and the White House that held the hose that could satisfy that thrust that didn't happen with gay rights movement until much later but it finally happened it was people who forced the change happened with the me to movement started out there it takes that combustion of ground moral power and political courage and wisdom and the ability of the system the courts and others to move and sink almost to relieve long-standing well I think the people starting the quarters are is a reactive institution and it doesn't say it doesn't have a platform doesn't say this year we're going to deal with this or that issue it takes the complaints that are out there so it has to start with with the people and the people don't care nothing is going to happen I urge all of you to read a seminal article that the Justice wrote which is in the book in my my own my own words it's a wonderful collection a different one from Rosen's book but a wonderful collection of her opinions and her articles and their speeches and their lectures and in it you refer to the Supreme Court's constitutional mistakes by which I assume you mean for example Dred Scott and Plessy versus Ferguson it's clear from reading that that many of the constitutional issues the court has to decide entail arguable public policy choices when the majority makes a choice that you disagree with do you consider yourself bound bound by wedded know that this depends on the type of case most of the cases we hear are not the headaches constitutional variety but their interpretation of statutes so let's say there's a provision of the Internal Revenue Code I think the taxpayers should have one but the Court holds that the government is going the government wins that's eminently fixable by Congress Congress knows what the court held it doesn't amend the law so be it in that kind of case I will say I was on the other side but this is how the court ruled and it's up to Congress to change it if it wants to I don't take the same view of key constitutional questions and I continue to disagree with the majority when I think it has been egregiously wrong is that why you sometimes read your dissents from bench instead of issuing them first in writing well it's not instead of it's in addition to this into usually when a what a case is decided the writer of the majority opinion will read a summary of the opinion from the bench and then will note justice so and so joined by justices so and so dissent that's it one or two times a year sometimes four sometimes none when I think the court not only got it wrong but egregiously so I want to call attention to my dissent so I will summarize it from the bench I'm not going to read bore someone privating 20 pages but within five minutes so for example shelby county was such a case Hobby Lobby was another such a case we read better the case of lilly Ledbetter is the one I would nominate for an Oscar for its drama starring Ruth Bader Ginsburg it's classic it's classic Ginsburg a working woman named Lettie lilly ledbetter had sued Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company for back wages when she discovered she had worked for years without being paid what men were paid for doing the same work and if I'm correct the court decided five to four that whatever the merit of the pay was concerned she had waited too long to file her claim was a law said you must complain of the discriminatory act within 180 days of its occurrence the courts view was Lilly you're coming to us twelve years after you were engaged you're way out of time the dissent had a very simple notion is that the pay disparity was incorporated in every paycheck she received so it's not that the discrimination happened and then it was over it was continuing and every time she received a paycheck she she had a renewed 180 days in which to sue that's what Congress adopted in the lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the paycheck rule if the employer has been discriminating and the discrimination is kept up every time she gets a paycheck the discrimination is renewed but when I tried to get across in my dissent was Lily was doing a job that up until then had been doesn't dominantly by men she doesn't want to be in troublemaker she doesn't want to rock the boat the employer doesn't give up a figure but suppose somehow she had brought a suit early on the defense almost certainly would have been it has nothing to do with Lily being a woman she just doesn't do the job as well as the men so we pay her less now advance a dozen or so years they have been giving her good performance ratings all along so now the defense that she doesn't do the job as well as the men that's out because she's been rated higher than the men she has a winnable case the court said she sued too late well it was it was a very short order that Congress with large majorities both Republican and Democrat passed that measure it was kind of a replay of what happened in the 70s when the court decided that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not discrimination on the basis of sex their reason being the world is divided into non pregnant people that's most of us most men most women of all men all men and most women but then there's these people these pregnant people and there's no male countable so whatever it is it's not sex discrimination so Congress in 1978 passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act the soul of simplicity discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is discrimination on the basis of sex that those those decisions Gilbert in the 70s and Lilia Ledbetter's case many years later it just caught the public attention and said where are they to say discriminates on the basis of pregnancy isn't discrimination and then the same thing in well the reason I mentioned the drama in the list because you did forcefully read your dissent on the bench and for some reason or the other modern technology or washing in the breeze Obama rich Obama Barack Obama heard it well but with my tagline the very last line in the dissent was the ball is now in Congress's court to correct the error into which my colleagues have fought and the very first bill that Barack Obama signed when he arrived at the White House was the lilly Ledbetter pay air pass Fair Pay Act and that's the that's what I meant by the drama it goes with the metaphor of the umbrella you used in the in the Shelby County case which I know you must have written down when you were at Cornell and remembered it many years later do you remember it yeah tell us something to the effect of so you're not preclearance yeah we just work so well is like tossing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you haven't been getting away and someone and someone wrote in analyzing your experience at Cornell wonderful essay by the way I think it may have been Jeff Jeffrey Toobin our friend Jeffrey Toobin someone wrote that the image of using an umbrella in a rainstorm perfectly describes how the Voting Rights Act protected citizens and parts of the country where a discrimination has prevented more than one minority group from voting easily visualized and easily remembered I think the author of Lolita might well be applauding that line in your lecture on speaking in a judicial voice and your good friend and mine and Judas billed Josephson who's sitting right there on the front row reminded me of this you write about the importance of civility and respect among judges and justices that that is as you have said one of the hallmarks of the court collegiality but I'm wondering when your conservative colleagues rule in a way that diminishes the country as you see it rules that say that set women back or a decision that leads to the suppression of votes are to the execution of someone on death row don't you feel some outrage and do you ever express that outrage well you've quoted from some of money dissenting opinion but I'll use a phrase that my colleague Nino Scalia used again and again which get over it the most vivid memory I have is the Bush v Gore case where we divided sharply five to four but it was a marathon we accepted the case on a Saturday briefs were filed on Sunday oral argument on Monday decision out Tuesday so it was round-the-clock work for all of us and the ones who were among the four we were disappointed but we seen went into the January sitting and we had to reason together so we got over it I sent my law clerks down to Justice Kennedy's chambers he was on the other side he wrote the principal opinion for Bush and I wanted them to watch how the media was portraying this with Justice Kennedy's clerks Justice Scalia called me about 9 o'clock that evening and said roofs what are you doing still at the court you should go home and take a hot bath it is the most collegial place I've ever worked and even though I can be disappointed sorry disappointed in a colleague one day I know we have to go on to some very important work the next day so then we couldn't work as we do if we didn't maintain that collegiality but did he ever get under your skin you know I mean did you ever try to to restrain some of his verbal yeah I just thought you did and and he helped me because Justice Scalia was an expert for Marion and every once in a while I'd make a grammatical error he never embarrassed me by sending a note to the court saying change this he would either come to my chambers of homi on the phone I many times said this is so strident you'd be more persuasive if you toned it down and that was advice he never took but to give you another example fleet reality so one case where we divided sharply was the Virginia Military Institute case that's when you admitted women to what had been an all-male Academy in Virginia so the the court there were only eight members participating because justice Thomas's son was attending VMI so he was recused Scalia ended up a lone dissenter he came to my chambers and he threw down a sheaf of papers and said Ruth I'm I'm not yet ready to circulate this descent to the full court it still needs more policy but I want you to have it as early as I can give it to you so you'll have more time to answer it so I took his penultimate draft of his dissent on a plane with me I was going to a Judicial Conference I read it and it ruined my weekend but I was glad to have the extra time and I'm also very pleased to say how wrong time has proved him to be VMI has been a tremendous success story the school has hardly gone to wrack and ruin it's it's gotten better in in every way and they're very proud of their women cadets I'm so impressed that you don't you don't deal in abstractions but you remember the people for whom those decisions meant a different life or a different way of life a different chance in life where there was Sally Reed I believe she was the first in was in the Sharon frontier alone who will be with me in Omaha Nebraska this summer it's a celebration of the centennial of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote so Sharon whose case was the first one I actually argued in the court will be there I've stayed in touch with her over the years remember really yes in fact his son is coming to see me wieszczyk ville son yeah he spells it Weidenfeld pronounces it Wiesenfeld that why I don't know this is a man whose wife died in childbirth and he vowed that he would work only part-time so that he could care personally for his infant there were social security benefits for the survivor of a wage earner you could earn up to the earnings limit put together the Social Security and the part-timer earnings you could just about make it to support yourself and the child so Steven Weisenfeld went to the Social Security office to claim what he thought were child in care benefits he was told we're very sorry these are mother's benefits not father's so that was a case in which the court was unanimous in the judgment but divided three ways on the reason the majority said obviously the discrimination begins with the woman as wage earner she pays the same Social Security taxes as the men she doesn't get a discount on the taxes she owes but her family doesn't get the same protection from the Social Security system some including my now colleague John Paul Stevens of my recent Tony said this is discrimination against the male as parent because he doesn't have the opportunity to personally raise his child he has to employ a substitute for himself so he can make the money needed to support the family and then there was one and it was the first and the only time in the 70s when my later chief folded at least for the judgement that I was seeking and that was then justice rehnquist who said this is totally arbitrary from the point of view of the baby why should the baby have the opportunity to be cared for by his sole surviving parent only if the parent is female and not if that parent is male well I I'm gonna get a sizzling dissent from this I know but I yielded some of our time to serene and Judith and I'm not only halfway through the interview but I am receiving a wrap notice over here from our director I was going on to talk about the 19th amendment and where we are and the fact that a hundred years after women got the right to vote they still don't have equal political stature with men only 25 less than 25 percent of Congress is is is female but then there were none well that's true I was gonna lay it out sexual harassment equal pay all of that but we don't have time we'll come back to it I was going to talk about this remarkable issue of Daedalus magazine which is journal which is published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences updating us on where women are today it really something I think you and everyone here will want to want to read I'm going to end with one question to which I ask you to give me a brief answer if you will and and it's because of who is here tonight so many students who take very seriously their commitments to the moral imperative of faith that you do of the law there's a saying that made the rounds in Washington in the 1960s when injustice becomes law resistance becomes duty and students from Union faculty and staff as well frequently take on injustice directly they went to Ferguson they went to Standing Rock they've marched on the capital they've sat down on the streets with Bill McKibben and three fifty.org what should citizens do like these students have done who see injustice being perpetrated my faith is in its today's young people and I've seen it in my my granddaughter the things that she is doing in my former law first one of my former law clerks is devoted to seeing to it that every child who turns 18 registers to vote an organization that will take them to the polls my granddaughter is involved with a purple campaign which is concerned with the sexual harassment in in the workplace I think there was a spirit among today's young people that wants to come back in injustice that's what I believe in I would do everything I could to to encourage that you've done your share justice Jenna Berg thank them for thank you very much before we before we leave I want to say that in the audience tonight our Betsy West and oranga Kobe they did that wonderful film RBG thank you the coming serene remind everyone that we have a reception at the back that gives all of you a chance to talk to one another and enjoy the evening and I want to say one final word of deep gratitude and thanks to Bill Moyers the the nation's journalists and to Justice Ginsburg our hero in so many ways [Music] you

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Published: Thu Feb 13 2020