Hello, I'm Raseer Iqbal, and I'm in New York where I'm joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

She's a pioneer for gender equality and recently won the $1 million Bergruen prize awarded

annually to a thinker whose ideas have profoundly shaped human understanding and advancement.

What does it mean to you to have won this?

I was overwhelmed with the letter inviting me to accept the Bergen Prize.

As a government officer, I can't accept money for myself.

But this was an opportunity to give money to many good causes. I was a bit taken

back because I'm surely not a philosopher, but I do interpret a text, the text I interpret most often is the

US Constitution.

I can assure everyone here is indeed a living Constitution because who would want to be governed by a day

of the Constitution. But I also consider myself an originalist in this sense.

I think those founding fathers if they meant that our fundamental instrument of government would control society from generation to generation,

then they must have known, they must have expected it would have growth potential.

Tell us what you mean by that.

Well, take concepts like the equal protection of the laws.

That wasn't in the original constitution.

By the way, the original constitution

doesn't mention the word equal even though in the decoration of independence it was a motivating

idea that all men are created equal. That word doesn't appear in the Constitution and the reason is obvious

because our Constitution preserves slavery so it wasn't until after the Civil War that we got the equality guarantee

written into the Constitution. No state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.

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