1 - Notes on a Life

Summary

Early in the fall of 1971, I was pretty new to the Supreme Court beat, and I came upon a brief that I simply could not understand. The brief argued that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law applied not just to racial minorities, but also to women. “How can that be?” I wondered, since the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted after the Civil War specifically to protect African Americans.

I flipped to the front of the brief and saw it had been written by one Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Rutgers Law School professor. So, I called her. The short answer to my question was that the Fourteenth Amendment says no “person” shall be denied the equal protection of the law, and women, after all, are people.

But I got a lot more than that. She spent an hour i lling me in, teaching me, and answering my undoubtedly very stupid questions. I emerged from a tiny phone booth in the Supreme Court press room like a goose primed to have her liver removed for foie gras. We soon became phone friends.

I met RBG, as she is known inside the Court, at some rather boring legal conference in New York. It was so boring, in fact, that we undertook a different task - shopping.