Ginsburg Gives No Hint Of Giving Up the Bench

Her dissent in the court's 2007 decision that threw out an Alabama tire company manager's suit alleging discriminatory pay made Lilly Ledbetter a heroine on the left and led Congress to change the law, presenting Obama with his first major bill to sign. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged in a letter read at the symposium another message from Ginsburg, sent in a dissent last month in a case about the Voting Rights Act.

On stage for a question-and-answer session conducted by friendly law professors, Ginsburg was a tiny figure in black with bold jewelry and a luxurious stole. She moved slowly, but her voice was strong and her words precise. She made no mention, as she had in Boston, that an opening on the court could come "soon." Nor did she talk about her own plans, which she has indicated in the past include at least another five years on the court.

Instead, she stuck to familiar topics: a defense of looking to the holdings of foreign courts to inform the Supreme Court's decisions; her view that the "court never leads" in promoting social change but works in concert with other branches of government; her work as a lawyer in promoting gender equality; and her frustration at being the court's lone female since the first, Sandra Day O'Connor, left the court in 2006.

"Now, there I am all alone, and it doesn't look right," Ginsburg said. She said she watches the number of women at each session of the Supreme Court bar, notices that four of the nine members of Canada's Supreme Court are women, including the chief justice, and sees the female reporters who cover the court.

"It's lonely for me. Not that I don't love all my colleagues. I do," Ginsburg said.

She said she believes the controversy over whether the court should look to the experiences of a foreign court "is a passing phase."

"I frankly don't understand all the brouhaha lately in Congress and even from some of my colleagues about referring to foreign law," she said. Scalia is the biggest critic of the practice, and Roberts and Alito are also opposed.

The court's citation of foreign laws in decisions that struck down laws prohibiting same-sex relations and in restricting the death penalty has prompted criticism and even led to a now-dormant move in Congress to prohibit the practice.

"There is perhaps a misunderstanding that when you refer to a decision of [foreign courts] that you are using those as binding precedent," she said.

But she added: "Why shouldn't we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article from a professor?"

She also said that the strides she made as an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer crusading for gender and pay equality and her work on the court have been less about forcing change than making sure the law reflects the change that society has sanctioned.

The court ended school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Ginsburg said, because the federal government said, "Please, court, help us."

The same was true, she said, about perhaps the most famous decision Ginsburg has written for the court and the one discussed most often on Friday: U.S. v. Virginia, which ended the men-only policy at Virginia Military Institute.

"Who brought the challenge to VMI?" she reminded. "Not some liberal group out there but the U.S. government."