By Howard M. Riell
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is back on the job.
“How am I feeling?’’ she asked rhetorically at a book festival Saturday sponsored by the Library of Congress. “This audience can see that I am alive. And I am on my way to being very well.”
She added, “I love my job. It has kept me going through four cancer bouts. Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, I just know that I have to read a set of briefs and go over a draft opinion. Somehow, I have to surmount whatever is going on in my body and concentrate on the court’s work.”
Many have called for the ailing justice to retire, and charged that it is only political considerations that have prevented her from doing so. But as she told NPR’s Nina Totenberg in a recent interview, “The work is really what saved me, because I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of an opinion, and I knew it had to get done. So I had to get past whatever my aches and pains were just to do the job.”
Insiders have speculated that Ginsburg will be replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She is also a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School. President Donald Trump nominated Barrett on May 8, 2017, to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Ginsburg born Joan Ruth Bader, was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female justice, after Sandra Day O’Connor, of four to be confirmed to the court (along with Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who are still serving). Following O’Connor’s retirement, and until Sotomayor joined the court, Ginsburg was the only female justice on the Supreme Court. During that time, Ginsburg became more forceful with her dissents, which were noted by legal observers and in popular culture. She is generally viewed as belonging to the liberal wing of the court.
Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn. Her older sister died when she was a baby, and her mother, one of her biggest sources of encouragement, died shortly before Ginsburg graduated from high school. She then earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, and became a wife and mother before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated tied for first in her class.
