Justice Ginsburg recently sat down with Joan Biskupic of the USA Today to discuss the importance of the Supreme Court having more women, and how the fact that she is the only women impacted the oral arguments and confidential discussions among the Justices about some still-undecided cases:
Her status as the court’s lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl’s lasting humiliation, but Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager.
“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
. . . In interviews with USA TODAY before Souter’s retirement announcement Friday, Ginsburg said the court needs another woman. “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. I don’t say (the split) should be 50-50,” Ginsburg said. “It could be 60% men, 40% women, or the other way around. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.”
Since O’Connor’s departure in 2006, oral arguments and the justices’ behind-the-scenes discussions on how disputes should be resolved have had a different tone. In the strip-search case and others this term, Ginsburg has revealed a woman’s point of view that was strikingly at odds with those of many of her colleagues.
Ginsburg dominated oral arguments in an important case involving alleged discrimination related to pregnancy leaves. She was openly frustrated that some of her male colleagues, in her view, might not have understood the discrimination women face on the job.
She said the arguments in that dispute echoed those of a 2007 case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a 19-year worker at a Goodyear tire factory in Alabama who alleged that her pay didn’t keep pace with that of men who had equal or less seniority. In that case, the court