The XX Factor: What women really think.

Emily Interviews Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Savana Redding's School Was Wrong to Strip Search Her

The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this morning the strip search of Savana Redding, the 13-year-old student who was supposed to have somehow been hiding prescription ibuprofen in her underwear, only wasn't. That's a relief. At oral argument, some of the male justices got all jokey about their own school experiences of people sticking things in their underwear in middle school while they were changing for gym. That particular reminiscence came from Justice Stephen Breyer: Here's Dahlia's great write-up of the argument. And today, Justice David Souter specifically notes, in his majority opinion, that "changing for gym is getting ready for play." A strip search in response to an accusation, by contrast, is "fairly understood as so degrading that a number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be." I want to live in one of those places ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

AT&T v. Hulteen: The Ghost of Bad Supreme Court Rulings Past

Agreed, Dahlia, that Justice Ginsburg is carefully applying the law as she sees it in her dissent in AT&T v. Hulteen. Her problem is a bad old ruling that haunts this case and that all but one of her male colleagues refused to banish. In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy is not discrimination based on sex, because some women (the nonpregnant ones) won't be discriminated against. By ignoring how... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Ain't No Oprah Winfrey

The Supreme Court ruled, 7-2 yesterday in AT&T v. Hulteen, that women denied credits toward their pension for their pregnancies in the 1960s and '70s—before it became illegal—were not the victims of gender discrimination. The question came down to whether AT&T could rely on past discriminatory practices—before 1978 pregnant women were denied disability leave granted to men—to calculate pensions. Writing for the majority, David Souter found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Ginsburg on Why the Supreme Court Needs Another Woman

Dahlia, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would surely agree with you that it's long past time to rub out the equation that a woman justice equals a second-rate one. To make the case for why she needs a female colleague (or colleagues), she took the unusual step of talking about a case that's just been argued and not yet decided—the one involving the strip search of 13-year-old Savanna Redding. You wrote vividly about Ginsburg's apparent distress at the clueless reactions of some of the men on the court at oral argument. This week Ginsburg said as much to Joan Biskupic of USA Today. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," the justice said. "It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood."

Ginsburg also remembered being ignored by male lawyers at meetings in the 1960s and 1970s, only to have a man present repeat her point, and get a response. And incredibly, she feels the same way even now: "It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something—and I don't think I'm a confused speaker—and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point." Biskupic writes: "It was a revealing observation from a justice who generally praises her male colleagues, some of whom are close friends." No kidding.

Ginsburg also directly addressed the question of what women bring to the bench, as women:

"You know the line that Sandra [Day O'Connor] and I keep repeating … that 'at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same judgment'? But there are perceptions that we have because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to things that are said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not aware can be offensive."

The differences between male and female justices, she said, are "seldom in the outcome." But then, she added, "it is sometimes in the outcome."

PS: Ann Althouse (U. Wisconsin law prof, blogger extraordinaire) discuss diversity on the court.

No Courtroom Drama

Despite the extraordinary long-distance diagnostic skills of Sen. Jim Bunning, R. Ky., who predicted at a Saturday Republican fundraising dinner that she’ll be dead in nine months, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the bench for oral argument this morning, just as she’d promised. Ginsburg underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer earlier this month. Her doctors are optimistic about her prognosis.  As her clerks will tell you, Ginsburg doesn’t do drama. She also doesn’t miss court.

Tireless Justice Ginsburg

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was supposed to give the keynote address last week at a conference on women's equality and the law, at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. She couldn't make it, because of her recent cancer-related surgery. But she called, en route from leaving the hospital, to wish the conference goers well and to announce that she was on the mend and feeling good. Justice Ginsburg was clearly sending a message of strength—one that, as Dahlia pointed out, is entirely in line with the forceful approach she took to denouncing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter pay discrimination case.

The Rutgers conference reminded me of an earlier era of Ginsburg as tireless tigress: In the 1970s, she was an early and forceful litigator for women's rights. It's a story well told by Fred Strebeigh in his new book, Equal: Women Reshape American Law. Fred was my undergraduate writing teacher; this book is an incredibly industrious reporting effort that takes full advantage of his access to Ginsburg's litigation files. A revealing how-far-we've-come moment from 1970: One of Ginsburg's clients, Nora Simon, was a former Army nurse who was barred from further work in the military because she had been pregnant. "Under Army regulations a discharge for pregnancy renders a person ineligible for re-enlistment," Fred reports of the rules then. For Ginsburg, Simon's plight was personal. Five years earlier, as a professor at Rutgers without tenure, Ginsburg herself had gotten pregnant over the winter. Worried about whether her contract would be renewed, she said nothing about her pregnancy all spring, had her baby son in early September, and went right back to work. Tireless, indeed.