U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival

[Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning I'm Carla Hayden the librarian of Congress and I hope you all have been enjoying yourselves this morning now we have a rather large crowd this morning for this particular session and that's why I'm very thrilled to introduce our next program for the past year at the Library of Congress you may sit down because I have a few more things for the past year at the Library of Congress we have been celebrating changemakers and I can think of few people who more than a plea fit that description than the United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg [Applause] okay i'ma hurry up she is a hero and an inspiration to so many of us in fact at 4:00 a.m. this morning students from American University who are right over there camped out in front of this facility and they are here she says and I said um justice uh you know we're gonna talk about your graduation from Columbia Law School and taught it Rutgers and Columbian spent most of your career advocating on women's rights and all of these things and you've been called recently the Beyonce of jurisprudence and and the Justice I said could I say that she said I'd rather you say the JLo so without further ado she is joined by her co-authors of her best-selling memoir my own words co-authors Mary Hartnett as a professor at Georgetown Law wyndi w Williams a professor emeritus at Georgetown Law and her interviewer today and the interviewer the person you know very well from NPR miss Nina Totenberg so the notorious [Music] [Applause] please be seated no this one okay yeah and I have to tell you before I leave the stage I want to shake our hand [Applause] well I want to give her a hug but that would be very unprofessional so this is a quite an amazing group and I I'm very admiring of all the people who have been online for so many hours and waiting to see the justice there's a lot to see even though she's a pretty little person so how about JLo what was I was called about a month or so ago by Jennifer Lopez and she said she would like to meet me and introduce her fiance Alex Rodriguez so they came to chambers oh he had a very nice visit she mostly wanted to us if I had any secret about a happy marriage but now and a rod is traveling with her to concerts all over the world so what was your secret to a happy marriage did you pass on your mother-in-law's secret and on the day I was married my mother-in-law I was married in her home she took me aside and said she wanted to tell me what was the secret of a happy marriage and I said I'd be glad to hear what is it and she responded it helps sometimes to be a little deaf and that good advice I have followed in every workplace [Laughter] including the good job I now have so if an untied word thoughtless word I said you just tuned up [Applause] I would personally advise that instead of Chairman Mao you listen to Justice Ruth Justice Ginsburg we all know you've had some health challenges in the last year the last month you had radiation for most of August so let me ask you the question that everyone here wants to ask which is how are you feeling why are you here instead of resting up for the term and are you planning on staying in your current job how am I feeling well first this audience can see that I am Alive [Applause] and I am on my way to being very well [Applause] and why are you here instead of resting up for the time the term we have more than a month yet to go I would be prepared when the time comes [Applause] so how do you just keep trucking but one thing I love my job it's the best and the hardest job that I have ever had and it's what it has kept me going through for cancer bouts instead of concentrating on my aches and pains I just know that I have to read this set of briefs go over the draft opinion and so I have to somehow some surmount whatever my butt's at whatever is going on in my body and then concentrate on on the courts work so your book in my own words it's the first essentially of two by Mary Hartnett and Wendy Williams and you in some in the first one because it has a lot of your own words from the time you were in grammar school and writing for the school paper and an opinion opinion pieces and through your Supreme Court opinions and then there's going to be a later authorized biography these two ladies have been working on it for some time so Mary Hartman let me let me turn to you for a moment and ask you about the upcoming book I hesitate to ask this but I'm gonna do it because at least I have 4,000 witnesses when can I just say preliminary that my own words was to be a second my official biographer is Mary and Wendy have been in work how many years is 1515 2004 and the idea is the book we're talking about the biography would come out and it would be followed by selections from speeches I've given an opinions I've written but the years were going on and on and then it came to me that Mary and Wendy expected that I would be on the court for some time into the future so they to make the book complete they wanted to wait and I said okay let's flip the order let's have my selected writings first and then then the biography and it was a marvelous idea so you still haven't said when so that is my job questions you know this justice keeps doing things we're very happy about [Applause] it it will be the idea originally was that it would break the story of Justice Ginsburg it was before she was notorious but now yeah it will be the complete full story and so we want to wait until we have that and hopefully it will not come out very soon [Laughter] [Applause] I ought to you a little bit about the upcoming book you won't tell me much but I do know that there's a whole chapter about Justice Antonin Scalia justice Ginsburg's great friend sparring partner and entertainer in some ways so tell me why there is a whole chapter about him and about your interview of him so there's also a whole chapter of him about him in my own words including justice Ginsburg's reminisces about about Justice Scalia and and everyone I think in this room knows about the unlikely friendship between the two and interviewing Justice Scalia was a real treat for the book and we interviewed him for the biography but parts of that interview are in my own words and as Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg are so different in so many ways going into his chambers is very different justice ginsburg's chambers are light airy modern art dozens or hundreds of pictures of friends family colleagues and going into Justice Scalia's chamber it's dark leathery there's a big dead animal looking down and so as i sat there interviewing Justice Scalia I watched how he went from the kind of tough jurist that we all know and his face just softened and lightened up as he talked about his good friend Ruth and he he told several stories one was when they traveled to India together and they went to visit the Taj Mahal and Justice Scalia described how he watched Justice Ginsburg listen to the tour guide described the love story behind the building of the Taj Mahal and he said he saw tears start to stream from her eyes and as he told me that I ninety-eight percent sure it's I saw a tear not related to an opinion or a dissent come out and the other story that he liked to talk about was parasailing Justice Ginsburg at when she was a young seventy year old was in Nice for a legal exchange and was standing in the hotel looking out at the water and saw all these people parasailing and she turned to her husband Marty and said Marty that looks like fun we should do that Marty looked horrified and said are you crazy and if you do that I'll remember you to our grandchildren the Dean who was the host said I'll go parasailing with you this was Dean Yellen and his wife was equally horrified and she said if there's an accident and they can only save one of you it better not be you but so too so they went parasailing they had to adjust for weight because Dean Yellen was a normal sized human being and it was Justice Ginsburg and off they went and they went up and down and up and down plopped into the water and Wendy and I asked Justice Ginsburg about this experience a few years ago when we were interviewing her and said what was it like did you like it and Justice Ginsburg said it was marvelous glorious and then she related it of course to a Greek myth and said it was like Icarus but we didn't get too close to the Sun the way was also a problem in Robeson when we took a ride on a very elegant elephant there was a photograph of it my feminist friends asked why are you sitting in the back of the elephant and I explained it had to do with the district Justice Ginsburg you've always been a rather determined person when you were in law school your husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer doctors told you his chances of survival were extremely slim but the two of you just carried on and as we all know he survived but I thought people here might be interested in what your days and nights were like in that year and how how in some ways it set up your sleep patterns for life yeah it was my second year in law school Marty's third year and there was massive surgery followed by massive radiation there was no chemotherapy in in those days we just took each day as it came my routine was I would attend my classes I had no takers in auto bodies classes I would then go to Mass General the hospital where he was in the afternoon and then when he was released from the hospital and was having daily radiation he was first very sick and then he would sleep until about midnight when whatever food he ingested that day he would have mine not very good cooking but and then about two o'clock in the morning I was oh he was also dictating his senior paper to me he went back to bed about 2:00 in the morning and that's when I hit the books myself and in between there was our then two and a half year old daughter so I work for weeks many weeks I wish sleepy maybe two hours a night and that's how I became a night person I appreciated that in those early morning hours the telephone didn't rain there were no emails in those days it was a quiet time I can concentrate on the books well I hope you're getting more than two hours these days I do know that if you want to call the Ginsberg residence you do not on an on on a day like a weekend day you do not call before noon that's not true on sitting days I'm not true and after on court days at all so today women to some extent take for granted their equality in the workplace but that was not the case when you were a young lawyer you couldn't get a job in a law firm you had not one but two strikes against you you were well first a Jew and they were many three strikes long long well known firms in New York that would not yet up to welcoming Jews the next I was a woman that was a higher barrier but the absolute killer was I had a four year old daughter when I graduated from law school you were a mother so if they would take a chance on a woman a mother was more than they were willing to risk so you had top grades at Harvard and in your last year of law school when you moved to New York with your husband you were tied for first place of Columbia Law School and you're applying for clerkships and tell us how you finally did get a clerkship because nobody by and large would even interview you for the most part yes those were pre Title 7 days so employers were upfront about saying women are not welcome at this workplace or we had a lady lawyer once and she was dreadful so how many men have you had that didn't work but I had a wonderful professor at Columbia Law School who later moved to Stanford Jerry Gunther he was in charge of getting clerkships for Columbia students and he called every federal judge in the Second Circuit in the southern East Eastern District of New York and he was not meeting with success so he called a Columbia Graduate judge Edmond Palmieri who was a Columbia undergraduate at Columbia Law School graduate and always took his clerks from Columbia Columbia and he said I strongly recommend that you engage Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Palmieri's response was I've had women law clerks I know they're okay but she's a mother and sometimes we have to work on weekends even on the Sunday so professor Gunther said give her a chance and if she doesn't work out a young man in her class who's going to a downtown firm will jump in and take the so that was the carrot there was also a stick and the stick was if you don't give her a chance I will never recommend another Columbia Columbia graduate as your offer but that's the way it was in not so ancient days for women the big hurdle was to get that first job once a woman got the job she did it at least as well as the men so the second job was not the same obstacle but there's a wonderful book this is a meeting about books oh and let me mention it is called first and it's about it's a biography of Sandra Day O'Connor she was very high in her class at Stanford Law School but no law firm would hire her she was asked you type and maybe there would be a place as a legal secretary so what did she do she went to a County attorney and said I will work for you without pay for four months and then if you think I'm worth it you can put me on the payroll that's how Saturday all kind of got her first job but even after you're a clerkship you couldn't get a job in a law firm you ended up being a law professor no I I could have gotten a job in fact I was going to affirm when I professor another professor from Columbia hon Smith said how would you like to write a book about the Swedish judicial system well this is a part of her life you will not hear generally discussed so you're in on a question that normally doesn't come up I was just Vitas by the way and disembark anyway this was an irresistible offer because here I was in my 20s before I turned 30 I would have a book between hardcovers Marty and I marry the same month I graduated from Cornell so I had never lived on my own I went from a college dormitory to being married and I had what might be called the eight year itch I wanted to see if I could manage on my own and the deal was I would go to Sweden my daughter Jane would be taken care of by her father for about six weeks and when she finished school she came and joined me in Sweden and I got that out of my system I never again yearned to live on my own oh and there was the opportunity to learn about a culture and to learn a language that I knew nothing at all about so you Wendy one of you did you go back to did you go to Sweden you marry you ain't just she went back to Sweden this year yes it was it was the fiftieth anniversary of my honorary degree from the University of Luna and and you saw there what did you see on the streets your picture yes there were posters up and down the streets of one of the many many events that the justice did in Sweden she was very / programmed through three or four events a day but she wasn't daunted but we kept trying to see the poster as the car was looming through the streets and it was like that scene in the movie french-kiss where they never see the Eiffel Tower we kept looking and looking and finally driving to the airport remember we turned in there was Wendy you've been working on this book for 15 years with Mary did you interview all of the justices she served with how often did you interview her what do you do when you have 15 plus years what is your agenda when you before you answer that tell you how long so you're not gonna get Wendy and Mary came to see me and they said inevitably people are going to write about your life so why don't you make as your official biographers people you really trust and I certainly trusted Wendy and I were in the trenches in the 70s when for the first time in history it became possible for courts to accept that the Equal Protection Clause meant that women were people equal in stature turning [Applause] so I knew Wendy strategy and mine were pretty much the same I knew that she understood what we were trying to accomplish so I said yes without hesitation in fact when we when we came to her to talk about it she sat us down at a little table and on the table there was a stack of documents and opinions and other things about this hi and she said oh here's a little something that you might want to look at that's how we knew we were in so to speak so did you in fact interview all of the justices she's served with I did not interview any of the justices she served with but Mary doing this I mean did the two so the Epley between the two of you you interviewed them all we did yeah actually not all of them but some of them refused to be interviewed well and and there are some newer additions who will still plant we still plan to interview but but most of them and how often did you sit down with her for an extended interview I'm assuming it's a lot it's a lot we started out in that little moment in time after she was done with her summer and just before she had to knuckle down and prepare for the coming term and every year in August probably most often in the last week we we sit down with her for three days in a row in the late afternoon so we haven't we have our own big stack from that and she and this year was a little different we we went up to New York where she was getting her radiation treatment and was amazing how could she anyway so we sat with her twice up there and she she remembered everything she was perfectly normal except she was very tired which she has never let stopper and she wasn't letting it stop her then and that was and that was that was a new experience for us in New York but then we came back down for one day day before yesterday and did our third third day so every year we do that and then we do a lot of things in between they keep track of her so let me just say this to you to hear in front of God and everybody justice Brennan famously had an authorized biographer who got writer's block after he died and and somebody else eventually had to take over the project yes and I'm getting old is that everybody here some of whom are great dear younger than me want to be able to read the product of your Labor's well we do too so video you know I'm taking for granted this is a very educated and curious audience I'm taking for granted that everybody in this room has seen RBG at least once and on and on the basis and on the basis of sex so I'm not gonna go through all of the cases and the strategy and all of that of Justice Ginsburg because there are other places where you've seen this but there are also a lot of young people in this audience men and women and I wanted to ask Justice Ginsburg in light of that and in light of all of the conversation that we have these days about balance between work and family life to tell us the story of the elevator thief the elevator thief was my lively son it was when he was in the sixth grade I called him lively his teachers called him hyperactive and I would get calls about once every month to come down to the school to talk about my son's latest escapade but one day I was sitting in my office at Columbia Law School the phone rang it was the headmaster we need to see you immediately I've been particularly weary that day because I had stayed up all night writing a brief so I said this child has two parents please alternate calls and it's his product [Applause] so they called Marty who is then the head of the tax department at a large law firm he came down and was told your son stole the elevator and Marty's immediate response was he stole the elevator how far could he take it so I don't know if it was Marty sense of humor by the way the the theft was it was one of those old-fashioned handheld elevators the operator went out for a smoke one of James's classmates challenged him to take the kindergarten class up to the top of law which he did so out of that episode the calls came barely once a semester there was no quick change in my son's behavior but the school was much more reluctant to take a father away from his work than a mother so the suggestion to alternate calls did the trick so I want to I don't let me get that that son is today fine you and he's a great pair of two two two two bureaus and because she won't do it I will he has he runs a thing called Cydia Records CED il le and it they produce magnificent classical recordings okay that's my view that would be inappropriate for you to do but not me so let's talk about your time on the supreme court you're appointed by President Clinton and within three years of getting to the Supreme Court you're still a very junior justice you're assigned to write the Virginia Tech Virginia Military Institute case striking down their policy of exclusion of women and you you would not have gotten that just that assignment but for your female colleague justice O'Connor right yes and the seniority is very big you know workplace so that justice O'Connor would have been way ahead of me as it chose an opinion writer but Sandra said Ruth should write this opinion so it's thanks to justice O'Connor that I got to write the decision in the Virginia Military Institute case so you wrote in that case that most most women indeed most men would probably not want to meet the demands the rigorous demands of VMI but those extraordinary individuals who can meet those demands and want to meet those demands should be permitted to so you were invited to VMI a little over a year ago I think to give a speech how did that go in fact they had invited me to come to VMI at the 20th anniversary of the decision my calendar was too crowded so it turned out to be the 21st anniversary and you were with me yes and for that the the change in that that school has been enormous the commanding officer was so proud of his women cadets they live in the same Spartan quarters that the men live in but they were so enthusiastic many of them were in the engineering program one wanted to be an atomic scientist for the school by admitting women they were able to upgrade their apples and pool considerably [Laughter] [Applause] Windi where did she leave that well she left out a Ginsburg Scalia moment to begin with because what Justice Scalia found her opinion fairly outrageous and and he was very upset about the whole thing and his last sentence of his opinion said something like this this this is going to destroy EMI he used the word destroy and I asked Justice Ginsburg about that later and she said to me with perfect this was this was not so long after the opinion I think she said to me with the utmost confidence the UM I will be a better place if they're women and it won't be destroyed and the wonderful thing about that was when we were there for the 21st anniversary people there were so proud and excited to have you in person come there after you had transfigured the place that there was an audience almost as big as this and back there there were what do you call them bleacher leechers bleachers and all the cadets were there in their uniforms and for Ruth Ginsburg they all stood up and applauded it was just remarkable as it turned out Justice Scalia was the sole dissenter yes the VMI case the then chief chief justice rehnquist didn't join my opinion but he did join the judgment Justice Thomas was recused because his son attended VMI he couldn't purchase those so that left Scalia all alone Justice Scalia knew I felt deeply about the case as he did the other way and he came to my chambers one day threw down a sheaf of papers and said Bruce this is the pen ultimate draft of my dissent in the VMI case I'm not yet ready to circulate to the court but the clock was ticking and he wanted to give me as much time as he could to answer his rather strident descent you were going to the Second Circuit meeting yes I was going to the Judicial Conference in Lake George I was on the plane opened up his dissent and absolutely ruined my weekend but I was certainly glad to have the extra time to respond so talking about VMI reminds me that when you get to the court justice O'Connor of course was the first woman justice she's there she's been there for quite a while 12 years by herself and as you would later learn that's no fun because you got to be the only one for a while too and you know she was a reagan appointee she was a girl of the West you were a Clinton appointee you were from New York City and I wondered and you you very quickly though established a very special bond she as close as I came to having a big sister when I came on board she gave me some advice not too much I didn't want to douse me with excessive information just what I needed to know to navigate those first few weeks and then she was an enormous help in my first cancer about justice O'Connor I had a mastectomy and was on the bench nine days after our surgery so she was going to tell me how to manage this she said your scheduled chemotherapy for a Friday that way you can get over it during the weekend and be back in court on Monday and she also said you're gonna get in those days they would not yet emails but you know you're gonna get calls you're gonna get letters from all over don't even try to respond just concentrate on getting the courts work done I'm not telling any secrets here when I say that in in many of the courts biggest cases of late you are little but you are in the minority on the dissenting side but you know in the last five years or more you have pulled out some unexpected victories and I'm thinking for instance of the courts 2015 decision upholding Arizona's redistricting commissions these were created by state referendum by the voters to limit partisanship in the drawing of legislative districts in the state and well you tell the audience what your opinion said but the opinion said the opinion said you you upheld them why because something needs to be done about the partisan gerrymander and I think California was in the lead and Arizona the good voters of Arizona were tired of drawing district lines when it was very little incentive to vote because your district had been rigged it was going to be a Republican seat or a democratic seat so your vote didn't child that's not the way a democracy should run so Arizona and California had the idea and this was not done by their state legislatures state legislatures would not willingly give up the monopoly they had on redistricting so the good people of the state said this should be done the redistricting should be done by an independent commission not by partisan members of the legislature she presented a constitutional question because the Constitution says redistricting will be done by the legislature and there are so some of my colleagues said legislature means legislature and it doesn't mean the people to me it seemed quite clear that the state had made the people the legislature for this purpose states that have referendum do that they give the deciding voice to to the people to we the people and not the partisan members of the legislature and I think that after that case other states were encouraged other states that had referendum so the dissent in that case was written by Chief Justice Roberts and he argued very vigorously that the legislature means only of the legislature now fast forward to this year a five-to-four conservative majority ruled essentially that the voters have no ability to challenge extreme partisan gerrymander in court but at the same time the opinion written this time majority opinion written by the chief justice seem to suggest that other remedies like independent redistricting commissions provide alternative ways to address the problem of partisanship in redistricting so could you please explain what's going on here have the courts conservatives change their minds about redistricting is this just window dressing or what as one lives one learns so I think that you've learned that he was wrong yeah [Laughter] [Applause] so I want you to look at this crowd they tell me this is four thousand people I'm not quite sure next week you and I are going to another interview in Little Rock Arkansas in a venue that holds 18,000 people and not only are all the tickets gone there's a waiting list of 16,000 people [Applause] so so my dear notorious RBG how does it feel to be a cultural and pop icon in your 80s [Applause] it's amazing that at the advanced age of 86 everyone wants to take a picture with me the notorious RBG was started by a second-year student at New York University Law School she was dismayed about the decision the court had recently rendered in the Shelby County case that held the key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional then she thought to herself I'm angry about that but anger will not get me any place so I'm gonna do something positive the positive thing that she did was she put on the internet and then tumblr the announcement I made from the bench of my dissenting opinion in the Shelby County case and she called it the notorious RBG because she had in mind a well-known rapper the notorious b.i.g and people asked me what in the world do you have in common with the notorious yes I said it's evident [Applause] we were both born and bred in Brooklyn New York [Applause] by the way when you and justice O'Connor were on the court even at the end of her tenure some very seasoned Supreme Court advocates not newbies really seasoned people kept confusing you if they would call you justice O'Connor and her Justice Ginsburg and excuse me you don't look anything alike she had at least six inches on you her hairstyle was different her accent was there everything was different why for 12 years Sandra Day O'Connor was the lone woman on the Supreme Court and advocates were accustomed to their being a woman on the court her name was Sandra Day O'Connor so if they heard a woman's voice it had to be justice O'Connor but she would sometimes say I am justice O'Connor she's Justice Ginsburg me that happened not to just occasional lawyers who showed up but even the Solicitor General mortified as soon as he he called me justice O'Connor and realized the mistake that he had made he said he wanted he had a was wish that there was a trapdoor under his feet but nowadays we are 1/3 or the bench [Applause] I went all over the bench because of my seniority I sit next to the chief with justice Sotomayor on one side Justice Kagan on the other people who have attended argument at the court know that my my two sisters in law I'm not shrinking violence I'm very active in the colloquy that goes on in fact I think for some years there was a rivalry between Justice Scalia and justice Sotomayor who could ask the most questions she won so it seems to me appropriate since we began this interview talking about Justice Scalia we should end it in some ways there because the two of you were such pals for so many decades and such unlikely that was such an unlikely friendship to people from the outside why were you what did you what did you love about him so much he was a very funny man you know he had been buddies on the DC circuit for some years before he was appointed to the Supreme Court and that that was a three-judge bench sometimes he would whisper something to me that was so funny I had everything I could do to contain myself from bursting out into hysterical laughter and in this food court when we didn't sit next to each other he would sometimes send me notes I can't repeat this audience what someone there more about and there's there's a comic opera called Scalia Ginsburg that characterizes the two of us the different way we approach reading legal texts but our reverence for the court as an institution and for our Constitution so the DB was just a small sample this very amusing opera Scalia's opening Aria is a rage Aria it's very handily in its style and it goes like this the justices of lying how can they possibly spout this the Constitution says absolutely nothing about this and then I answer him dear Justice Scalia you are searching for bright-line solutions to problems that don't have easy answers but the great thing about our Constitution is that like our society it can evolve [Applause] so the plot is roughly based on the Magic Flute Justice Scalia is locked up in a dark room he is being punished for excessive dissenting and I enter the dark room through a glass ceiling [Applause] and say I'm there to help him pass the tests he needs to pass to get out of the darkroom and a character called the comment to Tori's and why would you want to help him he's your enemy and I explained he's not my enemy he's my dear friend and then we sing a wonderful do it goes like this we are different we are one different it now approach to legal tax but one in our reverence for the institution we serve and for the United States Constitution [Applause] so I know this seems like a very short time but we have already exceeded it and I thank the Justice her biographers all the people here who waited so long to come this has been a lovely morning Thank You Justice Ginsburg thank you very [Applause] thank you thank you thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 28,851

Rating: 4.46594 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, #NatBookFest, National Book Festival

Id: jDNPM6gj12Y

Length: 65min 46sec (3946 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019