The RBG Way by Rebecca Gibian

Author:Rebecca Gibian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510749597
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

The method of persuasion over anger has clearly not affected RBG’s ability to make systematic changes to the law, as we can see through her historic legacy. None of this is to say that Ginsburg doesn’t feel angry or have a limit. After all, she’s human, and she’s spent her life fighting against discrimination and sexism while actively facing it herself. However, she is able, as former clerk Berman put it, “to always find within herself a place of quiet resolve.”

And holding her tongue, or seeing the power in persuasion and not anger, doesn’t make her weak. For example, when Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, someone sent her a fax to let her know that the guys in law school used to call her by the nickname “Bitch.” Ginsburg responded by saying, “Better bitch than mouse.”33 Lithwick explained to me that RBG has just always been “unbelievably cautious” about expressing her anger. Throughout everything she has faced—being asked why she was taking a man’s place at Harvard, getting turned down for jobs because of her gender, getting called Justice O’Connor by lawyers who are arguing in front of the Supreme Court—Ginsburg has mostly been able to temper her anger. Lithwick wrote once that even when she was “absolutely maddened” by what the court had decided, she kept a cordial and collegial tone.34

Then things changed. For the first twelve and a half years on the court, Ginsburg had Justice O’Connor beside her. Even though they did not always agree on the final decisions, they both understood gender discrimination differently than their male counterparts, because they had personally experienced it. After O’Connor left, the court began to swing further and further to the right, and Ginsburg became unwilling to just sit back while her colleagues were diminishing or belittling real experiences of women, many of which she had personally experienced and been forced to play down in her own life.35

As she felt more and more lonely as the only woman on the court, RBG began to show the tension and anger she had been holding in all those years. She started speaking up more about her own experiences where she felt marginalized to try and finally repair existing injustices, but also to vocalize the “slights and slurs” she had previously been reluctant to speak about when she was a young lawyer. She was finally discussing the years in which she had been talking but no one was listening.36

So Ginsburg started dissenting, to the delight of feminists from the 1970s who remembered her well-written arguments and to the shock of those who sat beside her on the court. Again, her dissents have never just been a way to unload nearly eighty-six years of anger toward the way women and minorities are treated. Ginsburg’s dissents still have one of two goals: either persuade Congress to do something and make a change where the court cannot; or address future generations.37 She has been successful, sometimes. On the rare occasion, her dissents have caused Congress to write laws and have persuaded other justices to change their minds.

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