My Own Words

by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  O son of Abinoam! 3

  But from a young age, Ruth also resented what she saw as sometimes rigid adherence to seemingly hypocritical rules and the inferior role assigned to women. Her mother, Celia, told her stories about Celia’s Orthodox father, including a childhood memory of what started out as a happy Saturday afternoon. Celia watched her brother ride his shiny new bicycle, which he had bought with hard-earned dollars and dimes, but the happy afternoon dissolved into an anger- and tear-filled evening when their father destroyed the bicycle with an ax as punishment for bike riding on the Sabbath.4 And Ruth could not understand, in those days when only Jewish boys were ushered into adulthood with a religious celebration when they turned thirteen, why her cousin Richard got to have a bar mitzvah, “but there was no comparable ceremony for me.” 5

  Ruth attended various synagogues during her childhood (first a Reform temple and then an Orthodox synagogue where the women were relegated to the balcony) before finding the best fit at a Conservative temple, the East Midwood Jewish Center. There she spent Sunday mornings learning about Jewish history, holidays, and ceremonies, gained a beginner’s acquaintance with the Hebrew language, and at age thirteen was confirmed (a ceremony introduced in part to entice girls to continue their religious studies since only boys could be bar mitzvahed). Ruth and her classmates talked about the creation of a Jewish state, and placed coins in their Tzedeka boxes to pay for planting trees in Israel. Ruth also authored two pieces in the East Midwood Bulletin’s 1946 religious school graduation issue. One was a biographical tribute to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise on the occasion of his seventy-second birthday, which included thirteen-year-old Ruth’s praise of Rabbi Wise’s work for women’s suffrage: “He was champion of every righteous cause. Jew and Gentile alike came to hear him. He was a valiant fighter for woman suffrage and among the first American Zionists.”  6 The other piece, the lead article in that issue of the Bulletin, follows.

  Bulletin of the East Midwood Jewish Center

  1625 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y.

  Vol. XIII, June 21, 1946—Sivan 22, 5706, No. 42

  ONE PEOPLE

  The war has left a bloody trail and many deep wounds not too easily healed. Many people have been left with scars that take a long time to pass away. We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions. Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” In our beloved land families were not scattered, communities not erased nor our nation destroyed by the ravages of the World War.

  Yet, dare we be at ease? We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered. No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again. We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association.

  There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance. Then and only then shall we have a world built on the foundation of the Fatherhood of God and whose structure is the Brotherhood of Man.

  RUTH BADER

  Grade VIII

  Thirteen-year-old Ruth Bader at her confirmation at the East Midwood Jewish Center in June 1946. Ruth is immediately to the left of Rabbi Harry Halpern, center, and Ruth’s childhood friend and college roommate Joan Bruder [Danoff] is immediately to his right.

  June 1946, when the above piece was published, was a joyous time for Ruth’s parents. The long war years were finally over, Ruth had just been confirmed by Rabbi Harry Halpern—the same rabbi who had married her parents nearly twenty years earlier—and on June 24 they watched with pride as Ruth and her classmates marched into the auditorium for their eighth-grade graduation. The school orchestra played Sir Edward Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory.” Ruth, first in her class of 144 students, gave the valedictory speech.

  The family’s happiness was short-lived. Just as Ruth entered adolescence and started high school, her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Celia had her first operation when Ruth was thirteen, and Ruth’s high school years were punctuated by her mother’s hospital stays and haunted by her pain. In the 1940s there was no such thing as chemotherapy, and by the time the doctors diagnosed the cancer, it had already spread. At that time such a diagnosis was almost always a death sentence, and many family members would not even say the word cancer, referring to it only as “C.”  7

  Instead of letting her mother’s illness interfere with her studies, Ruth immersed herself in academics and extracurricular activities, relying on a routine of hard work, discipline, and little sleep to “carry her along,” a pattern she would repeat during times of adversity throughout her life. In addition to being an honor roll student and earning top grades, Ruth was active in student government and was a cello-playing member of the high school orchestra. She also belonged to the “Go-Getters” booster club, whose members sold tickets to school sporting events and in return were awarded coveted shiny black jackets with gold letters. She was also a “twirler,” performing with her baton at football games and even twirling her way through a Manhattan parade.

  Her serious study habits and academic achievements notwithstanding, Ruth’s classmates did not think of her as a “nerd” or “bookworm.” One classmate recalled that Ruth was “beautiful, outgoing, and friendly—not buddy-buddy with the world but she was very popular.” 8 According to another classmate, “She had this very quiet warmth, and a kind of magnetism.”  9

  As Ruth neared the end of her senior year, her mother’s health took a sharp turn for the worse. In a futile attempt to prolong Celia’s life, the doctors gave her an aggressive round of radiation treatment, which did nothing to relieve her pain but instead made her violently ill and increased her suffering. The week before Celia died she learned that Ruth, slated to graduate the following Tuesday, June 27, near the top of her class, had been chosen as one of a select few to be on a “Roundtable Forum of Honor” that would present commencement remarks at graduation. Neither Ruth nor Celia would be able to attend. Celia Bader died at home that Sunday, June 25, 1950, at the age of forty-eight. She was buried Monday afternoon next to her firstborn daughter, Marilyn. Ruth missed Tuesday’s high school graduation ceremony to stay home with her grieving father.

  3

  Wiretapping: Cure Worse than Disease?

  Letter to the Editor, Cornell Daily Sun

  (Nov. 30, 1953)

  IN THE FALL of 1950, a few months after her mother’s death, Ruth and her father packed her possessions into his aging Chevrolet and headed upstate to Cornell University, where Ruth had been awarded a full scholarship. Ruth’s college years at Cornell as a government major would prove key to her intellectual and personal development. The two teachers who influenced her most were very different people: Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist and professor of European literature, and Robert E. Cushman, a political scientist and constitutional scholar.

  According to Ruth, Nabokov changed the way she read and wrote: “He used words to paint pictures. Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the reader.” Ruth remembers Nabokov as a great showman and a spellbinding teacher, and recounted how his wife, Véra, would sit in the back of the third-floor lecture hall with its tall wooden doors and shake her head when he said something particularly outrageous. Ruth, whose judicial and scholarly writing is distinctively concise and well crafted, credits Nabokov: “I try to give people the picture in not too many words, and I strive to find the right words.” 1

  But it was the eminent constitutional scholar and writer on civil liberties, Robert Cushman, who first encouraged Ruth to go to law sch
ool. He may also have sowed in her the first seeds of the legal activism that characterized her work on behalf of gender equality under law in the 1970s. Professor Cushman supervised her independent studies project and then hired her as his research assistant. The early 1950s were the heyday of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s destructive campaign against those he labeled “card-carrying communists.” Before encountering Professor Cushman, Ruth confessed, “I didn’t want to think about these things; I really just wanted to get good grades and become successful—but he was both a teacher and a consciousness raiser.” 2 Cushman, who assigned her to research McCarthy’s assault on civil liberties, “wanted me to understand two things,” Ruth recalls. “One is that we were betraying our most fundamental values, and, two, that legal skills could help make things better, could help to challenge what was going on.” 3

  Ruth understood. In November of her senior year, she made her first foray into the realm of published legal argument, penning a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun on the admissibility of wiretapping evidence in espionage cases. Her piece was a response to a letter to the editor by two Cornell law students, expressing their support for Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s proposal, inspired by what Brownell said were recent “disclosures of successful communist espionage penetration in our government,” that Congress enact a law allowing federal prosecutors to introduce wiretap evidence when trying espionage cases. The law students cited a 1928 Supreme Court case, Olmstead v. United States, holding that wiretapping of private telephone calls by federal agents without a search warrant is not a search and seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The law students argued that wiretapping in such situations was not only constitutional but in the interests of national security: “Today . . . we find ourselves facing a rising ‘crime’ wave. No person, whether he be an adherent of McCarthyism or not, should righteously attempt to protect people who can be proved guilty of crimes by preventing the use of damning evidence.”

  While lawyer, judge, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would go on to craft hundreds of legal arguments and opinions, certain hallmarks of her legal writing and thought—her care in choosing words, her wariness of politically motivated prosecution, her concern that shortcuts in the name of efficiency often reduce effectiveness in the long run, and her unswerving commitment to individual rights and the presumption of innocence—shone through even in that first letter to her college newspaper. And, in classic Ruth Ginsburg fashion, the letter displayed none of the shrillness, bombast, or ideological fervor that can sometimes characterize the writings of college students and even some judges. This was not by accident. “I hope you noticed,” Justice Ginsburg remarked, when asked about her letter to the editor some five decades later, “how moderate I was!”4

  Cornell Daily Sun

  Monday, November 30, 1953

  Letter to the Editor

  Wiretapping: Cure Worse than Disease?

  To the Editor:

  Perhaps, as was argued by two law students in Tuesday’s issue, the Supreme Court wanted the regulation of wiretapping to be left to Congress, and therefore, upheld the constitutionality of wiretapping in the Olmstead case. However, few would agree that what is deemed constitutional is necessarily worthy or wise.

  Of course, society is interested in apprehending criminals, but the protection of the innocent has always been basic to our concept of justice. Both these ends must be weighed and balanced as to their relative merits before any conclusion can be reached about Mr. Brownell’s proposal to admit evidence obtained by wiretapping in federal criminal trials.

  What did the law students mean by telling us that we are faced with a rising “crime” wave? Were they speaking about an increase in the activities of gangsters and racketeers, or the growing number of cases in which individuals are being prosecuted for political crimes against the state? Particularly in the case of political crimes, the value of making it easier to apply the criminal sanction, when the conduct in question often involves slight danger and little conscious wrongdoing, should be seriously reflected.

  In the first place, what is the purpose of the criminal sanction? Is it just to put a man behind bars, or is it to attach the moral condemnation of the community to certain forms of behavior? Unless moral judgment is involved, the cost of enforcing the criminal code might well be employed in other areas.

  Today, restraints have been imposed in areas where individual free choice was formerly permitted. To a large extent, restrictions have been necessary for the good of society. However, the criminal sanction is still the most extreme measure that is available to the government, and it should not be lightly employed if other satisfactory alternatives can be substituted. We may regard something as an emergency measure today, but we should remember that the criminal law not only reflects the moral outlook of the community, but may very well alter or create moral attitudes. When attempts to prevent certain forms of behavior may place individual rights and liberties in peril, the criminal sanction should be saved as a last resort.

  Wiretapping may save the government investigators a good deal of time and effort by making it unnecessary to seek other sources of proof. A thorough investigation of cases may seem like a burdensome task, especially when the shortcut of wiretapping can achieve more immediate results. As an officer in India once said, “It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper into a poor devil’s eyes than to go out in the sun hunting the evidence.”

  But, even if the situation today demands increased vigilance on the part of the government, restraints on individual rights in the field of individual privacy, morality, and conscience can be a cure worse than the disease. We may be anxious to reduce crime, but we should remember that in our system of justice, the presumption of innocence is prime, and the law cannot apply one rule to Joe who is a good man, and another to John, who is a hardened criminal.

  The general good Mr. Brownell’s proposal is expected to accomplish seems to me to be outweighed by the general harm it may well do.

  RUTH BADER ’54

  4

  Marty Ginsburg’s Favorite Subject

  Remarks Introducing Justice Ginsburg

  (Sept. 25, 2003)

  AS MARTY GINSBURG recounts in the following piece, it was during her first year at Cornell that Ruth Bader, then seventeen, met the man who would become first her best friend and then her husband and life partner. Marty Ginsburg, eighteen and a sophomore, was handsome, gregarious, brilliant, and brash. He met freshman Ruth on a blind double date orchestrated by Marty’s roommate Marc, who was dating a housemate of Ruth’s, did not own a car, and wanted Marty to drive all four of them to a formal dance.

  As you will read in Marty’s remarks, he was struck by Ruth’s beauty from the very beginning. And, as he told us in an interview many years later, he quickly realized that she was more than just attractive. “I did not know she was also smart, but I discovered that when we had a second date and it came through to me that not only was she really smart, [but] unlike most of the smart first-year girls who hadn’t yet decided to suppress their intelligence—and there were a few of those—she wasn’t glib. I don’t remember who said it first, but it’s such a wonderful line and so accurate: Ruth is somebody who is simply not afraid of dead air time. If you ask her a question that requires a thought-through answer she will stop, think it through and then answer it. She has done that for the fifty-four years I have known her. She still does it at dinner.” 1

  For her part, Ruth called Marty “the first guy ever interested in me because of what was in my head.” 2 Marty was an unusual man for the 1950s: not only was he not threatened by Ruth’s intelligence, but he actively encouraged and took pride in her academic and professional pursuits. As Ruth explained, “He’s so secure about himself, he never regarded me as any kind of threat to his ego. On the contrary, he took great pride in being married to someone he considered very able.” 3 According to Ruth, Marty “always made me feel I was better than I
thought I was, that I could accomplish whatever I sought. He had enormous confidence in my ability, more than I had in myself.” 4

  Despite meeting on a blind “date,” their relationship remained platonic for some time because Ruth had a boyfriend who attended Columbia Law School and Marty a girlfriend at Smith College. But they soon became best friends, drawn together by shared intellectual interests and abilities, and were delighted to discover that they both loved opera, a passion shared by few of their peers. After Marty gave up his chemistry major because the afternoon science labs interfered with his golf team practice, he and Ruth enrolled in several of the same classes. Taking classes together was a strategic choice for Marty: Not only could he spend more time with Ruth, but he could also rely on her meticulous notes when he cut class.

  Having already become such close friends, once Ruth and Marty became romantically involved, it did not take them long to realize that they wanted to marry and spend their lives together. Instead of one “aha” moment, it was more like a steady crescendo. In Marty’s words: “When did I decide it would be a sensible idea that Ruth and I should spend the rest of our time together? I don’t know, but I can assure you it was long before she did.” It was clear to Marty, early on, “that I obviously was going to have a much better and much happier life with Ruth than without her.” And when he proposed to Ruth—“I think we were in a car at the time,” he recalls—she answered with a resounding “yes.” 5 They were married in June 1954, weeks after Ruth graduated from Cornell and Marty finished his first year at Harvard Law School. Decades later, Ruth said, “It was the best decision I ever made.” 6

  Introduction by Martin Ginsburg of Ruth Bader Ginsburg