Amicus Presents: The Class of RBG Part Two
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 July 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the women who went to law school with her knew something of what it had taken to get there. In the second part of this special series, Dahlia Lithwick talks to Justice Ginsburg’s classmates about their lives in the law after Harvard, and to Justice Ginsburg herself about what women in the law today can take from their stories.
Read Slate’s full interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg about her own time at Harvard Law School and her memories of her female classmates here. Read the full stories of each woman’s life here.
Archive of President Bill Clinton announcing his intent to nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court courtesy; William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Please be seated. |
| 0:07.0 | I wish you all a good afternoon and I thank the members of the Congress and other interested Americans who are here. |
| 0:17.0 | After careful reflection, I am proud to nominate for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court |
| 0:22.2 | Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. |
| 0:28.9 | June 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins President Bill Clinton in the Rose Garden as he announces his intent to nominate her to the Supreme Court. |
| 0:41.1 | If, as I believe, the measure of a person's values can best be measured by examining the life the person |
| 0:47.4 | lives, then Judge Ginsburg's values are the very ones that represent the best in America. |
| 0:54.3 | I am proud to nominate this path-breaking attorney, advocate, and judge |
| 0:58.2 | to be the 107th justice to the United States Supreme Court. |
| 1:04.8 | Looking at this moment in the rearview mirror, there's the sheen of inevitability. |
| 1:13.9 | At the time, though, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn't particularly well known. She was a centrist judge on a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Important, |
| 1:20.4 | sure, but not a household name. Mr. President, I am grateful beyond measure for the confidence you have placed in me, |
| 1:34.3 | and I will strive with all that I have to live up to your expectations in making this appointment. |
| 1:47.6 | But even as Ginsburg stepped into the public imagination for the first time, |
| 1:52.9 | there were some people who had been watching her for decades, |
| 1:57.4 | the other women of the Harvard Law School class of 1959. |
| 2:02.1 | My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. |
| 2:08.3 | That class included less than 10 women. |
| 2:12.5 | As Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood next to President Bill Clinton in the Rose Garden, |
| 2:16.7 | one former classmate, Rhoda Isselbacher, was in the car driving back from Cape Cod with her kids and her husband. |
| 2:25.5 | Everyone in the family remembered this moment. |
| 2:28.7 | Rhoda died in 2015, but her husband, Kurt, and her children talked to us for this project. |
... |
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