At least that’s the only conclusion I can draw from this recent comment by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
BOSTON — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Friday that she dislikes being “all alone on the court” nearly a year after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor.
Ginsburg, who spoke to an assembly at Suffolk University Law School, said she sees more women in law school, arguing before the court and sitting as federal judges.
“My consolation is that if you look at the federal courts altogether, you get a much different picture than you do if you look only at the U.S. Supreme Court,” she said.
Of herself and O’Connor, the court’s first female justice, Ginsburg said: “We have very different backgrounds. We divide on a lot of important questions, but we have had the experience of growing up women and we have certain sensitivities that our male colleagues lack.”
This reminds me of my law school graduation back in 1993.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was our commencement speaker, and about 90% of her commencement speech was devoted to women in the law. Keep in mind this was a commencement speech, not a meeting of Women’s Law Association.
Frankly, it didn’t bother me all that much. I was graduating from law school and happy to get my degree and, quite honestly, between high school and college, I was used to boring commencement speeches.
What surprised me at the time was the fact that Ginsburg’s speech pretty much pissed off my Mom, a professional woman in her own right. She was annoyed because she thought Ginsburg was discounting the accomplishments of everyone in the class, and only emphasizing her own political agenda.
I didn’t think much about it at the time, but Ginsburg’s apparent belief that women somehow make better judges than men makes me wonder if Mom didn’t have a point all those years ago.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:46 am
“different” and “better” don’t mean the same thing. She’s right, women do have sensitivities that men lack, and vice versa. Are you suggesting that this isn’t so?