Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 15, 1993 TAG: 9306150097
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN BAER THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
A Supreme Court justice turned her down for a clerkship on the basis of her gender.
And as she said Monday in the White House Rose Garden, pointing out a certain irony as she was being nominated by President Clinton for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: "Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment."
As the wife and mother of two later blazed a legal trail against gender discrimination - earning a reputation as the Thurgood Marshall of the women's movement - Ginsburg, 60, never wore those early experiences of gender bias on her sleeve.
A private, scholarly and reserved woman, the Carter-appointed U.S. Court of Appeals judge fought to break down those barriers through the force of her intellect, rather than any ideologically driven activism.
"She was the real intellectual frontierswoman in developing the theory of the Constitution that protects women," says Washington lawyer Michael Greenberger.
But as she sat at the table before the Supreme Court in the '70s, arguing six landmark cases as special counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project - often using cases where the plaintiffs were men to develop the legal strategy against gender discrimination - everyone knew where she came from.
"Her struggles to find work when she graduated from law school were famous," says Diane Zimmerman, a law professor at New York University and a former Ginsburg student. "Everybody knew what Ruth had gone through. She was the primary example of how unfair the profession was to women. She made up her mind she could do something about it for other women - and she did it."
At Harvard, where she studied law from 1956-58 after graduating from Cornell University, the dean invited the handful of women in her class to dinner at his home one night and asked why they were there taking the place of qualified men.
She transferred to Columbia in her last year when her husband, fellow lawyer Martin D. Ginsburg, got a job in New York. Although she hoped to stay there to teach, it would take 13 years - after she served as a law clerk to Judge Edmund L. Palmieri, one of the few federal judges who would hire women, and a teaching job at Rutgers University Law School - before Columbia would hire its first woman as a full professor.
"Even at that time as [Columbia] was getting ready to hire the first tenured professor, there were discussions about can a woman handle a class?" recalls Columbia Law School Dean Vivian Berger, who followed on Ginsburg's heels.
When Ginsburg was hired, she had to decide whether to set up her office on a floor with a library - or on a floor with one of the few ladies' restrooms.
She chose the library.
Some of her associates, including former students, describe her as cool and remote. "Clinton said he wanted someone with heart. That is not Ruth Bader Ginsburg," says one lawyer and former student. "She is smart and passionate, but she is aloof and standoffish."
But to a class of women who entered law school in the early to mid-'70s, she became an inspirational role model.
"When we looked around, Ruth was the person for us," says M.E. Freeman, a New York lawyer who graduated from Columbia in 1976. "Our mothers didn't do this. She was our role model. She had a husband. She had children. She was discriminated against. She was a source of inspiration to all of us."
At Monday's White House ceremony, the Brooklyn native made several references to her husband, her two children - Jane Ginsburg, 37, like her mother a professor at Columbia Law School, and James Ginsburg, a law student at the University of Chicago and a classical records producer - and her two grandchildren.
In thanking President Clinton for the nomination she noted that, in her daughter's high school yearbook from 1973, young Jane's ambition is listed as "seeing her mother appointed to the Supreme Court. . . . If necessary, Jane will appoint her."
She noted that, fortunately for her family, her husband has made it easy for her to stay out of the kitchen.
Aside from being the cook in the family, Martin Ginsburg splits his time between a Washington law firm, where he is a partner, and the Georgetown University Law Center, where he is a tax law professor.
He also has been a longtime friend of and tax lawyer to Ross Perot. In fact, in return for helping to deftly manage the Texas billionaire's bank account during the General Motors buyout of his computer company, Perot made a $1 million contribution to the law center in 1986 to endow a chair in Ginsburg's name.
by CNB