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This blog is the work of an educated civilian, not of an expert in the fields discussed.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Justice Ginsburg Interview



[And Also: Salon has more on the below interview, particularly on stereotypes, and flows into some Sotomayor stuff.]

Emily Bazelon, of Slate fame, is the grandaughter of the grand liberal judge David Bazelon. A fact that some might know when they read her columns ... it does make her a perfect fit (as are her liberal/feminist views) to interview Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We have seen more of Ginsburg of late, but it is not a new thing. For instance, she has multiple speeches (unlike many who have none) at the Supreme Court website. [Breyer and Rehnquist are next.] And, many reflect her lifelong advocacy for women's rights:
One last story from the 1970s: the case of Captain Susan Struck, an Air Force officer serving as a nurse in Vietnam where, in 1970, she became pregnant. She was offered this choice: Have an abortion on base or leave the Service. (Captain Struck's case antedated the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which held that women have a constitutionally-protected right to control their own reproductive capacity. In those days, several military bases, without fanfare, made abortion available to women servicemembers and dependents of servicemembers.) Captain Struck, a Roman Catholic, would not have an abortion, but she undertook to use no more than her accumulated leave time for the birth, and she had arranged for the baby's adoption immediately after birth. She sued to fend off the discharge Air Force regulations required. She lost in the court of first instance and in the Court of Appeals. But she was well represented by ACLU lawyers in the State of Washington, and each month was able to secure a stay of her discharge.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear her plea. It was an ideal case to argue the sex equality dimension of laws and regulations regarding pregnancy and childbirth. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold saw loss potential for the Government. He recommended that the Air Force waive Captain Struck's discharge and abandon its policy of automatically discharging women for pregnancy. The Air Force did so, and the Solicitor General thereupon moved to dismiss the case as moot.

She repeated the story in her most recent interview, and it deserves to be spread. [In the speech, she noted that now she could not only be a nurse (even if she was pregnant), but a pilot.] The fact the U.S. government actually encouraged abortions was also discussed in Means of Reproduction by Michelle Goldberg, which noted that our sponsorship of international efforts in population control (and well-rounded health care generally, which is still a controversial matter these days apparently) was so successful that other nations took the ball when conservatives in this country pushed things in the other direction.

In this recent interview, Justice Ginsburg reinforced what she said in her dissent a couple years back:
Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often. ... The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.

The interview as a whole shows the quiet power of the justice and reaffirmed that social change is a result of many things. An important advocate for women's equality in the courts knew this if anything more than anyone:
The Legislature can make the change, can facilitate the change, as laws like the Family Medical Leave Act do. But it's not something a court can decree. A court can't tell the man, You've got to do more than carry out the garbage.

All the same, it can (and as she noted, did) protect his right to be home on family leave while doing so.* And, though she is mixed on the whys, diversity is an important aspect of insuring this process. Overall, good interview, and it's good (even if Souter is no fan, even he allowed a recent panel discussion to be televised for C-SPAN) for justices to give the public a window into their views.

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* Speaking of family, there was an interesting bit of personal in this oral argument where Justice Ginsburg repeatedly referenced her granddaughter, who was born in Paris.