What Next - Remembering RBG
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Friday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87. Her work as a lawyer and a judge forever changed how women are viewed under United States law. As the nation mourns, her absence sparks a fight in the senate about who is going to choose the next Supreme Court Justice.
Guest: Dahlia Lithwick, host of Slate’s Amicus podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dahlia Lithwick has covered the Supreme Court and watched Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a long time now. |
| 0:10.8 | But it wasn't until a few years back, she realized Ruth Bader Ginsburg was watching her, too. |
| 0:17.6 | She said she liked reading me because I was spicy. |
| 0:22.1 | That was the very first note I got, which was that she had said, I like reading that girl. |
| 0:28.2 | She's spicy. |
| 0:33.6 | There are a lot of ways to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy. |
| 0:37.8 | She was a feminist, a scholar, a jurist. |
| 0:42.0 | But Dahlia says she was also polite, old school. |
| 0:46.7 | Ginsburg was known for sending these notes out on Supreme Court stationary. |
| 0:51.4 | She sent one to a little girl who dressed up like her for her school's |
| 0:54.8 | superhero day. She sent another to a writer and fan who'd invited RBG to her wedding on a lark. |
| 1:03.5 | But it wasn't just thank you notes. The thing she was most famous for, I think, was like you'd |
| 1:10.2 | submit your wedding vows. Jeff Rosen tells this story. But so many people tell the story of submitting the draft of their wedding vows at 2 in the morning. And she'd edit it? Yeah, you'd get back. Jeff's version of the story is very funny that, you know, you just are sending in pro forma, like, this is what we've agreed to do. |
| 1:28.5 | Will you just read this? |
| 1:29.9 | And two in the morning, getting back handwritten like, this is a little retrograde. |
| 1:36.1 | Don't like this. |
| 1:37.1 | Maybe rethink this. |
| 1:38.9 | Editing someone's wedding vows for them, it reveals a precision that was trademark Ginsburg. |
| 1:46.0 | There was this famous story where when she argued a case at the Supreme Court, Justice |
| 1:50.5 | Blackman used to write, give people letter grades, the oral advocates when he was on the bench. |
| 1:56.1 | And he wrote C-plus when she argued, very precise female. And like, it it was not it was not a laudatory thing, but I often think that very precise female nails it exactly. Whoa. Have you have, have, are you mourning? Like do you, I know you're a reporter. You covered Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but have you given yourself time to feel sad? |
| 2:25.9 | Oh, man. I mean, Friday night I felt like I'd been really punched in the solar plexus. And that's ironic in light of the fact that we all knew about her |
... |
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