On Saturday, the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been admitted to a hospital after experiencing chills and fever.
By: TJV News
Last week, it had been reported that Justice Ginsburg had a bout of the flu.
In a statement, the court’s public information office said Ginsburg was admitted Friday night to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, as was reported by the AP. She was initially evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington before being transferred to Johns Hopkins for further evaluation and treatment of any possible infection.
AP reported that with intravenous antibiotics and fluids, her symptoms abated and she expected to be released from the hospital as early as Sunday morning, the statement said.
Justice Ginsburg missed oral arguments before the high court on Nov. 13 — which she almost never does — due to a stomach bug. She did, however, return for the court’s next public meeting on November 18.
“Justice Ginsburg is unable to be present today. She is indisposed due to illness, but she will participate in the consideration and decision of the cases on the basis of the briefs and the transcripts or recordings of the oral arguments,” Chief Justice John Roberts said from the bench on November 13th.
She has been treated for cancer twice in the past year and two other times since 1999. Over the summer she received radiation for a tumor on her pancreas. Last winter Justice Ginsburg underwent surgery for lung cancer.
Ginsburg, the second of only four women to serve on the high court, was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Before that she made her mark in the legal arena as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. During her tenure, she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court, winning five of them.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Carrying on her work for gender equality, Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Virginia, which ended the males-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute. Ginsburg wrote that the state-run institution could not use gender to deny women the opportunity to attend the prestigious school.
She was also instrumental in the court’s ruling in Safford Unified School District v. Redding, in which the court said a school went too far when it strip-searched a 13-year-old girl while looking for drugs.
Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion in the case of Bush v. Gore garnered her a lot of attention when she set aside her usually restrained style. Breaking from the majority opinion, which effectively decided the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Ginsburg ended her decision with the words, “I dissent,” markedly omitting the adverb “respectfully” that is traditionally included.
