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|Ginsburg: Court needs another woman |
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|By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY |
|WASHINGTON — Three years after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor left the Supreme Court, the impact of having only one woman on the nation's |
|highest bench has become particularly clear to that woman — Ruth Bader Ginsburg. |
|Her status as the court's lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched |
|by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl's lasting humiliation, but |
|Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager. |
|"They have never been a 13-year-old girl," she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues' comments during the arguments. "It's a|
|very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood." |
|As Justice David Souter prepares to retire at the end of the term this summer, the significance of Ginsburg's position as the nine-member |
|court's only woman has become a point of broad discussion. President Obama is under pressure from groups such as the National Women's Law |
|Center to nominate another woman. |
|In interviews with USA TODAY before Souter's retirement announcement Friday, Ginsburg said the court needs another woman. "Women belong in |
|all places where decisions are being made. I don't say (the split) should be 50-50," Ginsburg said. "It could be 60% men, 40% women, or the|
|other way around. It shouldn't be that women are the exception." |
|Since O'Connor's departure in 2006, oral arguments and the justices' behind-the-scenes discussions on how disputes should be resolved have |
|had a different tone. In the strip-search case and others this term, Ginsburg has revealed a woman's point of view that was strikingly at |
|odds with those of many of her colleagues. |
|Ginsburg dominated oral arguments in an important case involving alleged discrimination related to pregnancy leaves. She was openly |
|frustrated that some of her male colleagues, in her view, might not have understood the discrimination women face on the job. |
|She said the arguments in that dispute echoed those of a 2007 case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a 19-year worker at a Goodyear tire factory |
|in Alabama who alleged that her pay dropped over time compared with men who had equal or less seniority. In that case, the court — with |
|Ginsburg vigorously dissenting — narrowly ruled that women could not sue for pay inequities resulting from sex discrimination that had |
|occurred years earlier. |
|Oral arguments in the pregnancy case were "just, for me, Ledbetter repeated," Ginsburg told USA TODAY, adding that her colleagues showed "a|
|certain lack of understanding" of the bias a woman can face on the job. |
|In the justices' private conferences, during which they preliminarily discuss how they will vote on a dispute, Ginsburg said she feels the |
|absence of O'Connor, who was the first woman on the court. O'Connor retired to care for her husband, John, who has Alzheimer's. |
|"At the conference, she spoke long before I did," Ginsburg said, referring to the court's pattern of seniority for discussion of a case. |
|Noting O'Connor's forceful presence, Ginsburg added, "She is not an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand person." |
|Ginsburg, 76, a former women's rights advocate whom President Bill Clinton named to the high court in 1993, recalled that as a young, |
|female lawyer her voice often was ignored by male peers. "I don't know how many meetings I attended in the '60s and the '70s, where I would|
|say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea. … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert |
|to it, respond to it." |
|Even after 16 years as a justice, she said, that still sometimes occurs. "It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will |
|say something — and I don't think I'm a confused speaker — and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point."|
|It was a revealing observation from a justice who generally praises her male colleagues, some of whom are close friends. |
|Ginsburg said the court's gender imbalance has real, although not entirely obvious, consequences. |
|"You know the line that Sandra and I keep repeating … that 'at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same |
|judgment'? But there are perceptions that we have because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to things that are |
|said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not aware can be offensive." |
|The differences between male and female justices, she said, are "seldom in the outcome." But then, she added, "it is sometimes in the |
|outcome." |
|Ginsburg said having just one woman on the Supreme Court sends a disheartening message to Americans about women's roles in society. She |
|stressed the contrast between the Supreme Court and international courts, many of which have higher percentages of women. |
|The nine-member Supreme Court of Canada, for example, has four women justices, including the chief justice. Ginsburg also pointed to state |
|courts in the USA, where, according to the National Center for State Courts, 20 top state benches, including those in Florida, Michigan and|
|Wisconsin, are led by female chief justices. |
|The "worst part," Ginsburg said, is the image a single woman at the high court projects, particularly to young people visiting the court: |
|"Young women are going to think, 'Can I really aspire to that kind of post?' " |
|Conflicts over discrimination |
|Often Ginsburg's view as the court's only woman emerges in an understated way. The strip-search case that began in 2003 was different: Of |
|all the justices, Ginsburg was the most focused on the plight of Arizona student Savana Redding. |
|After a classmate told the vice principal at the Safford Middle School that Savana had unauthorized prescription-strength ibuprofen, the |
|vice principal directed a nurse and administrative aide to strip-search the girl. Savana's mother, April Redding, sued the school district |
|for violating her daughter's right to be free from unreasonable searches. Authorities found no drugs on Savana. |
|"After Redding was searched and nothing was found, she was put in a chair outside the vice principal's office for over two hours, and her |
|mother wasn't called," Ginsburg noted during oral arguments. "What was the reason for … putting her in that humiliating situation?" |
|One of Ginsburg's liberal colleagues, fellow Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, saw it a little differently. He said he had a hard time |
|understanding the girl's claim that her rights had been violated. |
|"I'm trying to work out why is this a major thing to, say, strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym," |
|Breyer said. "How bad is this?" |
|Ginsburg retorted that school officials had directed Redding "to shake (her) bra out, to shake, shake, stretch the top of (her) pants." |
|She later told USA TODAY, "Maybe a 13-year-old boy in a locker room doesn't have that same feeling about his body. But a girl who's just at|
|the age where she is developing, whether she has developed a lot … or … has not developed at all (might be) embarrassed about that." |
|Earlier in the term, Ginsburg was similarly exasperated by comments from some colleagues in the pregnancy-related case. The dispute |
|centered on pension benefits for women employees of AT&T who claimed they should have gotten credit for time off during a pregnancy leave. |
|"Discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is surely discrimination on the basis of sex," Ginsburg emphasized . |
|When the attorney for the women challenging AT&T took his turn at the lectern, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that if the |
|court ruled against the company in the case involving retroactive benefits, more lawsuits would come. |
|"You're scaring me," Scalia said, drawing laughter from spectators — but not from Ginsburg. |
|This was the case, yet to be ruled upon, that Ginsburg felt repeated Ledbetter. That 5-4 opinion written by conservative Justice Samuel |
|Alito — who succeeded O'Connor — rejected the notion that pay discrimination is harder to detect than other job bias and dismissed the |
|"policy" argument that the law allows more flexibility for suing in such situations. |
|Ginsburg was so incensed by the decision that she took the unusual step of reading her dissenting opinion from the bench and called on |
|Congress to reverse the court. |
|Congressional legislation, signed into law by Obama as one of his first official acts, gave workers far more freedom to sue for pay bias |
|long after it began. |
|Ginsburg said in an interview that she believed some of her male colleagues had trouble understanding the difficulty of getting |
|pay-disparity information and the general reluctance of women to claim a workplace policy is unfair. |
|"As often as Justice O'Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender |
|discrimination cases," said Ginsburg, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native and Democrat. "I have no doubt that she would have understood Lilly |
|Ledbetter's situation." |
|Great expectations |
|Women's rights and equal representation are causes Ginsburg advanced for most of her career before becoming a federal judge in 1980 on the |
|U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. |
|As director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project in the 1970s, she shepherded cases that led the Supreme Court to|
|increase its scrutiny of government policies that discriminated based on sex and to enhance opportunities for women on the job and in |
|education. |
|She won five of the six cases she took to the court. |
|Ginsburg, who survived colorectal cancer a decade ago and had surgery for pancreatic cancer in February, has vowed to serve several more |
|years on the bench. She is undergoing chemotherapy. |
|Ten days after her surgery in February she was back at oral arguments, never missing a session. |
|The next day, she attended Obama's appearance Feb. 24 before a joint session of Congress, because, she said, "I wanted people to see that |
|the Supreme Court isn't all male." |
|Such sentiment is quite different from her prediction in 1993 when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation |
|hearings. Then, the nation's second woman nominee to the high court said she thought she would soon be joined by more women. |
|"In my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the high court bench, women not shaped from the same mold, but of |
|different complexions," she told the senators. |
|"Yes, there are miles in front," Ginsburg said then. "But what a distance we have traveled from the day President Thomas Jefferson told his|
|secretary of State the appointment of women to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared. 'Nor,' Jefferson added,|
|'am I.' " |
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