 Good morning, and welcome. Rest assured that I have never been more mindful of the need to keep my remarks as short as possible. The Honorable Bruce Amselia of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is simply put, perhaps the finest jurist in the history of Rhode Island. He is also responsible in many ways, large and small, for today's program and for the trajectory of this law school. Please join me in welcoming him back to his courtroom. This is his first visit since the dedication in October. Welcome, judge. It is impossible to even sketch, in a reasonable amount of time, the contours of the remarkable personal and professional life of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In contemplating an attempt at that, I found myself thinking of a song that Jews sing during Passover when they gather around the seder table, Dianneau. And Dianneau means, roughly, that would have been enough. The lyrics of the song enumerate the many blessings that God has bestowed upon the Jews. And the refrain is that any one of those blessings alone would have been enough. So here goes, although I will not be singing. Justice Ginsburg would be worthy of a claim because she was the first woman invited to join the Harvard Law Review and because she graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School in 1959, the mother of a four-year-old daughter and the wife of a husband battling cancer. It would have been enough that she later became a prominent law professor and the first tenured woman on the Columbia Law faculty, overcoming overt acts of gender discrimination all along the way. It would have been enough that while teaching law, she co-founded the Women's Rights Project of the ACLU. And while teaching, she engineered and executed the legal strategy that led the United States Supreme Court to strike down gender-based government classifications as a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. And it would have been enough that she argued six of those cases before the High Court herself winning five. It would have been enough that she was nominated in 1980 to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, only the second woman to serve on that court, and served there with distinction for 13 years. And surely, it would have been enough that in 1993, she became only the second woman to serve on the nation's highest court. And in 1996, authored the opinion for the court in United States versus Virginia, which established the gender-based classifications. There, the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute were subject to height and constitutional scrutiny. And for some of us, not many, but for some of us, it would have been more than enough that she authored the majority opinion in a case called Gasperini versus Center of Humanities, an exceedingly complex exegesis on the eerie doctrine that delights teachers of civil procedure, but bedevils their students. But of course, there's more. She has become, perhaps, the best known justice in the history of the court. And she has chosen to be with us today. And to that, I say Diana. And I present to you Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Thank you very much, Dean Yolmofsky. What you are about to hear is a spontaneous and unrehearsed conversation between two people who have known each other. Guess it's more than 60 years at this point, since we were both at law school at the same time. And because of the breadth of Justice Ginsburg's accomplishments, I could usefully ask her questions for probably the next 24 hours if our stamina held out. But I think that the place to start, mindful that we have an audience composed, at least partially, of present-day law students is to ask you, Justice, to tell us something about what led to your decision in the 1950s to become a lawyer, and what was it like going to law school at that time in history? What led me to become a lawyer? I went to college thinking I would be a high school history teacher. It was a secure job for a woman. But I had a wonderful professor of constitutional law as an undergraduate, Robert Cushman. The 50s went up a great time for our nation. There was a red scare. There was Senator Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin who saw a communist in every corner. I worked as a research assistant to Professor Cushman. And he wanted me to understand that our country was straying from its most fundamental values. That is that we have the right to think, speak, and write as we believe, and not as a big brother. The government tells us it's the right way to think. He pointed out that many people, notably from the entertainment world, were being called before the House of American Activities Committee or the Senate Investigating Committee. And they were quizzed about some socialist group they belonged to in the height of the Depression in the 30s. And the lawyers representing these people were reminding our Congress we have a First Amendment and we have a Fifth Amendment that protects us against self-incrimination. And I got the idea from that that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing. You could earn a living. I didn't know how hard that was for a woman at the time. But you could do something to make your society better. So that's Bruce how I decided to go to law school. There was a question whether I met my husband when I was a first year colonel. And we married the month that I graduated. Question, would we go to the business school or the law school? But Harvard solved that problem for us because the business school did not admit women in the 50s. It wasn't until the mid-60s that they did. So that's how I ended up in law school. And Bruce, what was the... What was law school like when you got there? How many women were in your class? I'm a class of roughly 500 at Harvard Law School. My class had nine women. Judge Saudia's class had five women. So nine was a big improvement. And it was a certain challenge. There would be one or two of us in a class. And we felt, if we were called on, we had a heavy responsibility. We were not speaking just for ourselves, but for all women. So if we flubbed, the reaction might be, well, what would you expect? She's only a woman. So the women were super prepared. And they were, on the whole, better prepared than men. I had come from a college with a four-to-one ratio, four men to every woman. Cornell University in New York, it was the place parents wanted to send their daughters, because if you didn't find your man at Cornell, you were hopeless. As indeed you did. That's how I did. But Cornell's excuse for this ratio, it's a restrictive quota, was the girls have to live in the dormitories. The boys can live in college town. That's why we have many more men than women. When I get to Harvard Law School, there's no room in the dormitory for women. The dormitory is reserved for men. In my case, it didn't matter because I was married and I had a 14-month-old when I started law school. So I was not going to live in the dormitory under any circumstances. I suppose one of the biggest problems for the women in my class, there were two teaching buildings at the law school. There was Langdell and there was Austin. Only one of them had a women's bathroom. So if you were in Langdell and you were taking an exam, and the exam was what, time-pressured, you had to make a mad dash to Austin. In fact, when the Harvard Law School decided to admit women, the first class was 50-51, the biggest item, what would a cost to admit women? The cost would be they had to install a women's bathroom in Austin. And there's a book called Pinstripes and Pearls by Judy Hope. She was in the class of 65 at Harvard. That has an appendix, the budget, what it would cost to install one women's bathroom. What was the job market like when you graduated group? There was no Title VII. And employers were upfront about not wanting to hire women. So they would be sign-up sheets and say, men only. I don't know how many times I was told by law firm interviewers, we had a woman once, and she was dreadful. How many men have you had that didn't work out to satisfy them? For women of my era, the important thing was to get your foot in the door, get that first job. You got the job. You generally performed at least as well as the men. So the next step wasn't so hard. But Justice Ocar has this story, and very similar to all of the women who graduated law school in the 50s. She was ranked very high in her class. No law firm would hire her. So she volunteered to work for a county attorney in California. She said, I'll work free for four months. And then if you find that I am satisfactory, you can put me on the payroll. And of course, she was the best of all the young lawyers in the office, so she was put on the payroll after working without paying for four months. You began your teaching career at Rutgers, as I recall. Rutgers is a state university. And when the dean, who was a very kindly man, told me that I would have to take a cut in pay, I expected that because it was a state university. But when he told me how much, I was startled. And I asked, well, how much are you paying, so and so. A man who had been out of law school about the same amount of time. And the dean's response was rude. He has a wife and two children to support. Your husband has a good paying job for the New York firm. This was the very year that the Equal Pay Act passed. But the message didn't sink in. The women in the Newark campus of Rutgers got together and filed an Equal Pay claim against the university. Just straight Equal Pay. We didn't make it Title VII. It was finally settled in 1969. And the lowest increase that a woman received as a result of that settlement was $6,000, which in 1969 was a lot more than it is today. Tell us a little bit about how the Women's Rights Project came into being and what your role was with it. The A.C.I. Women's Rights Project commenced in 1972. It was after the Supreme Court decided that the turning point gender discrimination case, Reed V. Reed, up until then, the Supreme Court had never seen a gender-based classification that it didn't like or at least it didn't think was unconstitutional. So there had been in 1948 a case named Gossett against Cleary in the state of Michigan. During World War II, a number of women took jobs that up until then had been occupied only by men. And one of those jobs was bartender. So the Gossetts were a mother and a daughter. The mother owned a tavern, and her daughter was behind the bar, the bartender. When Michigan passed a law, I think largely as a result of urging by the bartender's union, excluding women, unless they were the wife or the daughter of the male bar owner. In the Gossetts case, it was very simple. This law is putting us out of business. It goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court writes a rather flippant opinion where it refers to the old heir wife in England of Trosses' days, and then it flips and says, bars can be places where unpleasant things go on, and we need to protect women. It never occurred to them that in the tavern, there was the bar, the bartender's behind the bar. There were waitresses who were going to the tables in much closer relationship to the men who had imbibed more than they should have. And it was an interesting story. When the Supreme Court upheld that law, the Michigan liquor commission wisely decided that they were not going to enforce it. So in fact, the Gossetts were never out of work. Next case, 1961. And now we have the quote, liberal Warren Court. A woman named Gwendolyn Hoyt was what we would today call a battered woman. But one day, she was having a dispute with her philandering abusive husband, and she became so enraged, so beside herself because of the humiliation to which she'd been exposed. She noticed her young son's baseball bat at the corner of the room. She took it, and with all her might, hit him over the head as he fell against the stone floor, ended their altercation, beginning of the murder prosecution. In those days, in Hillsborough County, Florida, where she was from, women were not on the jury rolls. And her argument was, I'm entitled to a jury drawn from a cross-section of the community, and a cross-section must include half the population. That got to the Supreme Court, and the response was women have the best of all possible worlds. If they want to serve on juries, all they have to do is go to the clerk's office and sign up. But if they don't want to serve, we don't call them. The message for women was, the men have no excuse, they must serve, but the women are expendable. We don't really need them to take part in the administration of justice. So that's where the Supreme Court was in 1961. 10 years later, now with Warren Berger, who is considered conservative, as the Chief Justice, Sally Reed's case came to the court. And this was Sally's case. She's a woman from Boise, Idaho. An everyday woman, she made her living by caring for elderly or infirm people. She had a son, she had her husband divorced. And when the son was young, Sally was given custody because the child was with the law called of tender year. So there was a mother preference. When the boy reached his teens, the father asked if he could be custodian because now the boy needed to be prepared for a man's world. Sally Reed fought mightily against giving the father custody. But the family court judge agreed with Cecil Reed. Sadly, Sally was right to be fearful. The son became severely depressed. And one day took out one of his father's many guns and committed suicide. So Sally wanted to be appointed administrator of her son's estate. And not because there was any economic value, but for sentimental reasons. Her former husband applied to be appointed administrator second in time, so normally first in time would be preferred. But the probate judge told Sally Reed, I have no choice. The Idaho law reads, as between persons equally entitled to administer the decedent estate, males must be preferred to females. So it was a case with compelling facts and a law as stark as it could be. One of the chief ACIU's general counsel noticed the Idaho Supreme Court's decision upholding this law and predicted that that would be the turning point case. So the ACIU petition and the court took the case. And I was the principal author of the brief in Reed. After that victory, the court was unanimous. It was a spare opinion, but they were unanimous and saying, Sally had been denied the equal protection of the laws. The ACIU recognized that the time was right for to have the law catch up with the way people were living their lives. And by then it was the most common pattern to have two earners in the family, demographics were working in favor of the change. Longevity meant that women would live many years without child care responsibilities. And inflation helped, too, because we did need two earners. So the court then in that decade of the 70s struck down many state and federal laws that arbitrarily discriminated on the basis of gender. Congress got into the act. The Civil Rights Commission did a study of the US code. And there was many, many of the explicit gender-based classifications were removed by Congress. It was kind of a dialogue between the court, the court would rule against gender-based discrimination, and the legislature would follow up. It was something that could not have been done in the 50s or the 60s. Gwendolyn Hoyt's case is a good example of what the attitude was as late as 1961. So by the end of the 70s, almost all the explicit gender-based classifications were gone. Ruth, you have become the recognized as the champion of women's rights. And many people have attempted to draw a comparison between what you have done in the name of gender equality and what Thurgood Marshall did in the name of racial equality. I understand that you're uncomfortable with that comparison. Why? Because my life was never in danger. Thurgood Marshall would go to a town in the south. And when he got up in the morning, didn't know whether he'd be alive at the end of the day, I never encountered such a risk. He was inspirational to us because of the campaign that he led up to Brown v. Bourne. He wanted to have building blocks. He didn't want to confront the court all at once and say, separate equal has to go. So he argued a number of cases in the lower courts, some in the Supreme Court, saying these facilities are not equal. And I think the clearest case was a sweat against painter. When the University of Texas was told, you can't exclude African-Americans. You have to give them legal education. They set up a separate law school that was anything but equal. And then there were a couple of cases involving university admissions. So Thurgood Marshall didn't go to the top of the hill in one fell swoop. He carefully had his building blocks lined up. And that's what we copied, that strategy, to take cases that were likely winners and notch up the Supreme Court's scrutiny of gender-based classifications. As your career moved on, let me switch the emphasis for purposes of this question. In 1980, President Kider appointed you to the DC Circuit and you were confirmed unanimously. I was appointed to the First Circuit a few years later by President Reagan and confirmed unanimously. When you went to the Supreme Court, my recollection is that the confirmation vote was 96 to 3. All of that now seems like ancient history. As I recall it, none of the last four nominees to the United States Supreme Court have received fewer than 30 negative votes. Some have received quite a bit more negative votes. And Circuit Court nominees all too frequently go along party lines. How do you think that type of polarization, what sort of lasting effects do you foresee that has on the judiciary and on the functioning of courts? And do you think it is an irreversible phenomenon or a temporary trend? Let me digress for a moment, because Judge Salia mentioned Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter had only one term in office. There was no Supreme Court vacancy to fill. But that president literally changed the complexion of the US judiciary. Carter looked around and said, those judges, they all look like me. They're all white and they're all male. But that's not how the great United States looks. So Carter was determined to appoint women and members of minority groups to the federal courts in numbers. He did. He appointed 11 to courts of appeals, and I was one of the lucky 11. I think over 25 to district courts. And no president ever returned to the not so good old days. In fact, President Reagan didn't want to be outdone. He wanted to put the first woman on the Supreme Court, but he did at the Saturday O'Connor. So let's go back to the 90s. And when I was nominated for the good job I now have. There was truly a bipartisan spirit prevailing in the Congress. Joe Biden, then Senator Joe Biden, was the chair of the Judiciary Committee. The ranking Republican was Oren Hatch. Oren Hatch was my biggest supporter on the Judiciary Committee. My White House handlers were fearful about my ACLU connection. So they would ask me questions like, you were on the ACLU board in 1976, and they passed this without resolution. How did you vote? I said, stop, because there's nothing that you can do that would lead me to bad mouth. The ACLU is just off the table. There was not a single question in that hearing about my ACLU litigation. I was nominated in June. Any senator could have held me up, and then my nomination would go over into a reform. Instead, I was confirmed on August 3rd, even the three who voted against me didn't hold up the hearings. Someday, I hope we will get back to the way it was. It's the same way with Justice Breyer. He had, his vote was in the 90s. Or if you go back to the 80s, take my dear colleague Justice Scalia. He had been on the D.C. Circuit. He'd been a law professor. He'd written many things and given many speeches. He was a totally known quantity. The vote for Scalia was 100%. No negative votes. And yet, the last four nominations we've seen, I think a plague on both your houses, four fine justices who should have gotten overwhelming support, but got many negative votes. I think it will take great leaders on both sides of the aisle to say, let's stop this nonsense and start working for our country the way we should. One of my great fears for the judiciary is that the public will get the impression that the federal courts are, they're just another political branch of government, that we can expect them to divide on party lines just like Congress does. We have a great federal judiciary, and I hope we can keep it. From your lips to God's ear. Mm-hmm. When you took your seat on the Supreme Court, I know that you developed a very special relationship with Sandra O'Connor. Can you tell us a little bit about that? She was the closest I came to having a big sister. I didn't have a big sister, but she died when I was very young. But Justice O'Connor was a person who whatever life brought to her, she coped with it, including she had massive breast cancer surgery. She was on the bench hearing O'Connor's argument nine days after her surgery. Justice O'Connor had been quite close to our chief. They both went to the Stanford Law School. They both ended up practicing in Arizona. It was rumored, and I think it's true, that they even dated when they were law students. So she knew the chief very well. And she told me just what I needed to know and to cope in those starting weeks. When the first sitting ended and the assignments came around, I was expecting that the new justice would get a single issue, unanimous decision to write. That was the tradition. My old chief, of whom I became exceedingly fine, assigned me a miserable ERISA case. ERISA is one of the most complex statutes Congress ever passed. And the vote was 6 to 3. So I went to Sandra to complain. I said, he wasn't supposed to do that to me. And she said, Ruth, you just do it. Just do it. And get your opinion out before he makes the next set of assignments, otherwise you're likely to end up with an equally unpleasant case. But that was her attitude to everything, whatever it was. She just did it. In speaking of Sandra O'Connor, I remember something that perhaps you could elaborate on, that her late husband, John, proposed your late husband, Marty, for membership in some sort of special society? The Dennis Thatcher Society. What's the Dennis Thatcher Society? The Dennis Thatcher Society is, you all know, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister of Great Britain. The men in the Dennis Thatcher Society, the men whose wife had a job, and in their heart of hearts, they would really like to have. And I'll say something else about Sandra, who helped me through one of the most difficult times that I had colorectal cancer. So she said, now, Ruth, you're going to have chemotherapy. Schedule it for Friday. You'll get over it over the weekend. You'll be well enough to get back to court on Monday. And then the helpful advice is you're going to get lots of sympathy, lots in those days, letters. Don't even try to answer them. Just concentrate on preparing for the cases on our docket. Now, in addition to the colorectal cancer, you also survived a second bout. Yeah, I'm patching up, yes. And 10 years later. And again, without letting it interfere with your work schedule in any perceptible way. Yes, I didn't miss any sitting. And how do you feel now? I feel fine. I attribute my good health to my personal trainer, Brian Johnson, who has been with me since 1999. And isn't there a new book or a video out on the RGB workout? Well, Brian has a book out. It's called the RBG Workout. It has been, the whole routine has been filmed. Only a part of it is shown in this documentary, RBG, which will be out sometime around May. And Brian has many reporters want to know about the routine. And it's suggested that Brian take them through it. And most of them family through it. That routine has gotten a new twist, I understand. Not that I can stay up late enough to watch, but I understand that Kate McKinnon, who portrays you on Saturday Night Live, has pictured you as a vitamin-trugging, weightlifting person who is determined to survive the Trump administration. Kate McKinnon has the same name as Kitty McKinnon, a woman, a law teacher, who really made the law of sexual harassment in the workplace. I remember receiving in the mid-70s a manuscript that she had written. The book became Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, in which she suggested that sexual harassment violated Title 7. Now, if you ask the sexual harassment covered by Title 7, you would answer, of course. In those days, it was far from, of course. Ruth, I don't want our time to go without asking you about your well-known friendship with Nino Scalia, how that developed. When did Nino and I first become friends with each other? It was when he was still a law professor. He was on the faculty first of University of Virginia and University of Chicago. And there was an American Bar Association sponsored event in DC with an administrative law topic. It was the first time I had seen Justice Scalia. I disagreed with a lot of what he said, but I was captivated by his way and said it. This is a man who cares about words and not surprising. His father was a Latin professor at Brooklyn College and his mother had been a great school teacher. What I love most about him is his ability to make even the most sober judge smile even laugh. When we were together on the DC Circuit and he would whisper something to me during the argument and I had to pinch myself very hard. We shared a love of opera and we were twice supers, extras of the Washington National Opera. And we also cared about family. Of course, it was quite a difference. I have only two children. Justice Scalia had nine. But we would, even though we were often on opposite sides, we would go over each other's opinion. And my suggestions were always, you know, you should tone this down. You'll be more persuasive. For me, he would call or come to my chambers and say, Ruth, you made a couple of grammatical slips in this opinion. And he always did it on a personal level so he wouldn't embarrass me by sending a memo to my colleagues. The case where we were most at odds, the Virginia Military Institute case, Scalia ended up being the sole dissenter. I had circulated my opinion in the beginning of April. And it was now coming on to June. I was about to go to my Second Circuit Judicial Conference in Lake George, New York. And Justice Scalia comes into my chambers, throws down a sheet of papers, and said, Ruth, I'm not yet ready to circulate to the court. This is only my penultimate draft of my dissent. But I want to give you as much time as I can to respond to it. So I packed it in my briefcase, went on the plane, started reading it, and it absolutely ruined my weekend. But I was so glad to have the extra days to respond. By the way, that decision, it was a celebration in 2016 of the 20th anniversary of the VMI decision. And to go to that school and see the number of women cadets who were thriving there and how proud the general who said of the school is of the women. They live in the same Spartan conditions as the men do, except they made one concession. In the beginning, things were a bit rocky. And the head of the school said, we make no concessions to the women. When they come in, just like the men, they get their heads shaved. Well, the VMI got over that and found it really wasn't necessary to shave the women's heads. But they go through the rat line just like the men. And they're strong, determined. Many of them are in the engineering program, which in my days was considered even less than less friendly to women in the law. Ruth, I think probably right at the end and in an effort to end this portion of the conversation on a light note, perhaps you could give us your impressions and tell our friends here about the Scalia Ginsburg. Oh, Scalia Ginsburg, the opera, as you would expect. It's a comic opera. And the plot is roughly based on the magic flute. And Justice Scalia, in the beginning of the opera, is put in a dark room. He's being punished for excessive dissenting. And then I enter through a class here to help him get through the test in his so that he will see the light again. He has the opening aria. It's Handelian in style. It's a rage aria. And Justice Scalia sings, the justice is blind. How can they possibly spout this? The Constitution says, absolutely nothing about this. And then I answer in my lyric soprano that he's 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. And then she goes into let it grow. When I come to help Justice Scalia, the commentary who's a character left over from Don Giovanni is surprised. He said, why do you want to help him? He's your enemy. And I said, he's not my enemy. He's my friend. And then we sing a duet that goes, we are different. We are one, different in the way we approach legal texts. But one in our reverence for the federal judiciary and institution we serve. My time. But the justice has agreed to answer some questions. And so there are some students I know who have some questions prepared. If you could make your way to one of these mics. Is this one working? It is. OK, great. If you can make your way to one of these mics, and please introduce yourself before you ask your question, that would be terrific. Good morning, Justice Ginsburg. My name is Stephanie Diorio. I'm a 2L here at Roger Williams. And it's an honor and a privilege to have you here today. Thank you. My question is that you were speaking about your friendship with Justice Scalia. Despite your strong disagreements on many important issues, how can we as a nation be more like you and Justice Scalia were? How can we deeply disagree on how our nation should work and how our Constitution should govern, yet find a way to do so without the animosity that we are currently experiencing? Thank you. One way is to begin with the children. And that is an idea that Justice O'Connor has promoted. She has this iCivics. It's kind of an interactive game that they play. And they learn about our government. And my hope really is that we will get over this period. I have cause to be hopeful when I mentioned how things were in the 50s when the red scare was overwhelming in the United States. That time has passed. This time will, will too. We have something so wonderful in this nation. The democracy that exists, it would be tragic to lose it. And I think that good people, whether they're Democrat or Republican, appreciate that. And there are people in Congress who are striving to have a good working relationship. I was at a meeting and I was surprised to see how well Elizabeth Warren was getting along with her Republican colleagues. Amy Herbichal is another one who makes special effort. Susan Collin, another. I think we will, we will see this time ended this fierce partisanship. Thank you for being here today. It truly is an honor. My name is Emily Heisler and I'm a second year law student. And Justice Ginsburg, if you had to choose just one piece of advice to give to attorneys who are presenting oral arguments, not only in front of the Supreme Court, but in front of any judge or panel, what would that advice be? Don't attempt to give a federal appellate bench a prepared spew. We have a no reading rule in our court. A lawyer will be fortunate to get two minutes free before the questions begin. A lawyer needs to be flexible in that milieu, wants to welcome questions from the bench. Why not? If you are giving a speech to an audience, you don't know how they're reacting to it. The questions from the bench give the lawyer an opportunity to satisfy the decision maker on a particular point. So flexibilities is very important. In the days when I was arguing before appellate benches, I always had the first sentence worked out, memorized. But after that, you just flow with the ego where the court wants wants to go. So I would say, in nimble and flexible, is the skill that the best oral advocates have. They don't look pained, wasn't it, Judge? Good morning, Justice Ginsburg. My name is Tyler Bischoff. I'm a 3L here at Roger Williams. And thank you for being here. My question is whether justices should be influenced by social movements. It seems that Brown would never have happened without the civil rights movement, VMI without the women's movement, and Obergefell without the movement for LGBTQ rights. So is it justifiable that these political movements influence what the court says the Constitution means? A great constitutional law scholar, Paul Freund, once said, the court should never be influenced by the weather of the day. But inevitably, it will be influenced by the climate of the era. In response to Judge Salia, I already mentioned the difference between the court of the 60s, considered to be liberal, and of the 70s. The court was catching up to changes that had already occurred in society. I should say about Brown, it wasn't just the civil rights movement in the 60s. It started with World War II. We were fighting a war against racism, and yet our troops for most of the war were rigidly segregated by race. I think the beginning of the end of separate but equal was the experience in World War II. But if you take my favorite provision of the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, what did that mean to the people who framed and ratified the amendment? If you ask them, does this guarantee the women will have equal rights? They would say, of course not. Many states still hadn't passed Married Women's Property Act, so women couldn't hold property in their own name. They couldn't sue and be sued in their own name and couldn't contract. That, by the way, was the background of the law in Sally Reed's case. Males must be preferred to females. Came on the books in the 19th century. If you had a choice between two people, the woman was likely to be married. If she was likely to be married, she couldn't contract. She couldn't sue in her own name. So all things considered, you would prefer the competent male and not the woman made incompetent by the law. Good morning, Justice Ginsburg. My name is Jen Leasy, and I'm a 3L here at Roger Williams. My question is, which of your majority opinions are you most proud of? And which of your dissenting opinions do you hope will one day become a majority? It's that kind of question is like asking which of my four grandchildren and two children is my favorite. Every case that I write is a challenge. I think the dean mentioned Gasperini. I taught civil procedure for 17 years, and I wish that I could write all of the civil procedure decisions, but none of us are allowed to be specialists. Justice Breyer, I think, would like to write all of the antitrust decisions. Doesn't have that option. Descends come in basically two kinds. One is it's a question of statutory interpretation. And then your audience is Congress. My favorite, I do have a favorite of that kind. And it was Lilly Ledbetter's case. The court divided five to four. And in a very short time, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Act was passed with overwhelming majority. So if or another example of this from the days I was a lawyer and not a judge was the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. When the Supreme Court came to the conclusion discrimination on the basis of pregnancy can't be discrimination on the basis of sex because the world is divided into two kinds of people. There are non-pregnant people. That's women and men. And then there are pregnant people. Those are only women. So there's no gender-based discrimination. Well, Congress thought otherwise. And in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the act was the sole simplicity. It simply said discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is discrimination on the basis of sex. So I was very pleased to see the result in the Lilly Ledbetter case. When it's a matter of constitutional interpretation, the dissenter is looking toward a later court that will see the era into which the court had fallen. I mean, we have a history of dissents in this country. Even the worst decision the court ever handed down, the Dred Scott decision, there were two dissenters and just courtesies, because that was particularly good. In the civil rights cases and the Plessy against Ferguson, the first Justice John Marshall Holland wrote fine dissents in those cases. The free speech dissents of Holmes and Brandeis around the time of World War I. Oh, those are the law of the land today. So a dissenter is either looking for an immediate correction by Congress or looking to a later court. Good morning, Justice Ginsburg. My name is Catherine Rodriguez. I'm a 1L here at Roger Williams and an alumni of Alpha Epsilon Phi. My question is, you were appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993. Around the time many of today's students were born, what decision do you think has had the most impact for today's generation? What decision over time since the beginning? During your tenure. Well, I think that the certainly one is the Obergefell decision. So I would put that at the top of my list. But it's another example of how society had changed. And the court was catching up to that change. It used to be that gay people had hid what they were. They were in the closet. And then with the movement that developed in the 70s, 80s, 90s, people came out of the closet and said, this is who I am, and I am proud of it. And I'm OK. When that happened, you looked around. This is why, in some respects, that change was a more rapid once it began with racial equality. Because we still have in this country a high degree of segregation where people live, where they go to school. But with the gay rights movement, people looked around and said, well, that's my next door neighbor. I'm very fond of her. Or that's my daughter's best friend. There wasn't that we they anymore, because these were part of us. They were our neighbors, our friends' children, maybe our children. I think that explains the rapidity of that development. And it is really what has made our country great. And think of how it was in the beginning, in 1787, when the original Constitution was adopted. It starts out, we the people. And who are we the people in 1787? White, male, and property owners. Over the course of our history, the composition of we the people has expanded. So it now includes the people left out at the beginning, people who were held in human bondage. Native Americans were not counted in we the people and half the population, women. So the idea of an abrasive society that not simply tolerates, but appreciates differences, I think is what has made our nation great. Thank you. To stop this, we could go on and on, but we the people is a pretty good place. Judge Salyia, Justice Ginsburg, thank you so much. Please come again any time.