Ginsburg's dedication undimmed after 20 years on court

• Supreme Court justice%27s work ethic has become legendary among colleagues
• Her passion for civil rights is rooted in her own struggles with gender discrimination
• Disagreement with conservative justices doesn%27t harm close bonds

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices sat largely still in late June as Chief Justice John Roberts announced his majority opinion against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All, that is, except Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

From her perch two seats to Roberts' left, the 80-year-old leader of the court's liberal wing busily scribbled notes as she waited to deliver her fourth dissent from the bench in two days. That flurry of jurisprudential indignation gave her five oral dissents — a rarity on the court — for the 2012 term, more than any justice has read aloud in at least 44 years.

"What has become of the court's usual restraint?" Ginsburg admonished her conservative colleagues, whose 5-4 ruling rendered impotent the voting rights law's most powerful tool against racial discrimination.

For the court's lone octogenarian, whose every move was watched during the recently concluded term for signs of physical or mental fatigue, the last of her fiery dissents was telling. As she completes her 20th year on the high court, she is not ready to retire, to recede into the history books. In fact, she is at the height of her power and influence.

"The court has the reputation of being conservative, but if you take activism to mean readiness to strike down laws passed by Congress, I think the current court will go down in history as one of the most active courts in that regard," she tells USA TODAY in a rare interview.

Indeed, most of the court's controversial decisions from late June are likely to spur legislative or legal action that could result in future Supreme Court cases, giving Ginsburg a chance to have the last laugh:

•In Fisher v. University of Texas, the court's 7-1 majority ordered the 5th Circuit appeals court to scrutinize the school's use of racial preferences in admissions. Ginsburg, the lone dissenter, said its affirmative action policy should be upheld.

•In Shelby County v. Holder, the voting rights case, Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to fight voting discrimination in other ways, and Democrats in Congress seek to resurrect the law's formula for deciding which states must seek prior approval from Washington for changes in voting procedures.

•In two employment discrimination cases denying individuals' claims involving workplace supervision and retaliation, Ginsburg called on Congress "to correct this court's wayward interpretations of Title VII" of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"The court's disregard for the realities of the workplace means that many victims of workplace harassment will have no effective remedy," she said in a dissent that had Justice Samuel Alito, the opinion's author, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

Though she hopes to be proved right in the long run, for now the diminutive justice with the quiet voice simply plans to continue working with a dedication and fastidiousness that has become legendary among her law clerks and colleagues.

"I think now I am the hardest-working justice. I wasn't until David Souter left us," she says, referring to the reclusive associate justice who retired in 2009. She is focused on her work, she says, "apart from my grandchildren and the opera."

BLAZING A TRAIL FOR WOMEN

Ginsburg's passion for civil rights springs in part from her own experiences in the 1950s and '60s, when she attended Harvard and Columbia law schools, made both law reviews and graduated at the top of her class, only to come up against gender discrimination.

"Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree," she recalled in 1993 upon accepting her Supreme Court nomination from President Bill Clinton at a Rose Garden news conference. Justice Felix Frankfurter denied her a clerkship because she was a woman.

So Ginsburg became a law professor, first at Rutgers, then Columbia. In the 1970s, she founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and went on to argue six landmark cases before the Supreme Court, winning five of them. The court's rulings applied the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause to women for the first time and established that discrimination against women must overcome a higher level of judicial scrutiny.

"She was literally the architect of the legal movement that led to protections for women under the Constitution," says Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women's Law Center and one of many women who call Ginsburg their mentor and role model.

Ginsburg, seated in her chambers amid the mementos and photographs that mark her career, is more humble in her self-assessment.

"I was tremendously fortunate to be alive and a lawyer, working at a university so I had more flexible hours, when the women's movement was coming alive and when it became possible to argue successfully for a view of the equal protection clause that included women," she says. Until then, "society was not ready to listen, and the court wasn't ready to listen."

Yet Ginsburg has been critical of the court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalizing abortion for going too far, too fast and creating a political backlash that continues to this day. That has created some consternation among abortion rights advocates while illuminating her preference for slow, steady progress.

RULING WITH 'MORE EMPATHY'

For her elevation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had many people to thank — President Jimmy Carter, President Clinton, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and even Harvard Law School Dean Erwin Griswold, who had refused to grant her a degree in 1959 even though she had earned the majority of her credits there. "Serendipitous things happen," she says.

Confirmed 96-3 by the Senate on Aug. 3, 1993, Ginsburg has gone on to compile a reliably liberal record on the bench while maintaining warm relationships with her more conservative colleagues. She is great friends with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia, like herself a veteran of academia and the D.C. appeals court. "She's just a very likable person," Scalia says.

That doesn't stop the court's conservatives from taking issue with her opinions. Responding to Ginsburg's contention in the voting rights case that Shelby County, Ala., was an unsuitable challenger because of voting discrimination there, Roberts responded: "That is like saying that a driver pulled over pursuant to a policy of stopping all redheads cannot complain about that policy, if it turns out his license has expired."

Ginsburg has been on the losing side of major 5-4 rulings involving gun rights, partial-birth abortion, campaign financing and the 2000 decision that gave the presidential election to George W. Bush. She's been on the winning side on issues ranging from affirmative action to gay rights — most recently the Proposition 8 and Defense of Marriage Act rulings on the term's last day.

One of her highlights came in 1996, when she won seven votes for her opinion striking down the Virginia Military Institute's male-only admission policy. "That was a very heady moment for me," she allows.

Her angry dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 2007 led Congress to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act two years later, making it easier for employees to win pay discrimination claims.

Deflated by the retirement in 2006 of her friend and comrade Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman ever to serve on the court, Ginsburg was reinvigorated by the additions of Justices Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010. The three women have formed a solid voting bloc on the court, agreeing with each other more often during the past term than any other pairing of justices.

"I think the greatest difference is in the public perception," Ginsburg says. "People come to the court, they see one woman toward the middle, one on either end, they see two very lively questioners among those women. ... The women are not shrinking violets. They more than hold their own."

But do they rule as women? "Maybe there's a little more empathy," she says. "Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like."

'INTO THE WEE HOURS'

On the bench, Ginsburg's small size and measured tones are accentuated in contrast to her more garrulous colleagues, who often don't let the lawyers at the lectern get a word in edgewise. She manages to have her say by asking the first questions most often, and her colloquial conversation sometimes belies her more formal appearance.

During oral arguments in March on the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to gay and lesbian couples, Ginsburg scoffed at what she called "this sort of skim-milk marriage." In a water rights dispute between Texas and Oklahoma the next month, she pinned down one of the lawyers by asking, "This clause, the one that you rely on, is kind of sketchy, isn't it?"

Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general who appears more frequently before the court than any other private attorney, says his clients are most impressed by how thoroughly Ginsburg reads and understands lower court rulings. During moot court practice sessions with stand-in "justices," lawyers preparing for their day in court commonly respond to queries about lower court actions with the response, "Well, Justice Ginsburg ... ."

Her former law clerks speak with one voice about her preparation for cases and work ethic. "She works late into the wee morning hours on her various cases," says California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, who clerked for Ginsburg during the 2000 presidential election and court battle. "It was not infrequent for law clerks to get messages left on their voicemail at 2 or 3 a.m., because that was her prime time."

"We are all driven by trying to please her," says Lisa Blatt, who clerked for Ginsburg at the appeals court and has argued more Supreme Court cases than any other woman in private practice, compiling a 32-1 record. "I don't want to make a mistake and let her down."

When it's time to write, Ginsburg is the court's speed demon, taking an average of 60 days from oral arguments to issue her majority opinions — nearly a month faster than all her colleagues. "Once it's done, she's done," says Jay Wexler, a former clerk and law professor at Boston University. "She's just very efficient."

ALBERS, OPERA AND PUSH-UPS

Ginsburg's dedication to the job hasn't always been easy. She has conquered two cancers — colon cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer a decade later. She withstood the death of her husband of 56 years, Martin Ginsburg, one of the nation's leading tax law attorneys and a renowned expert chef, in 2010. The next day, she was in court to deliver an opinion from the bench.

"She's had to ride a lot of ups and downs in her 20 years on the court," Liu says. "Whether it's facing down illness or most recently coping with the death of her husband, I think she's done it all with an incredible inner strength and a real iron will. She's a very tough person."

Since 1999, when she emerged from cancer surgery weighing less than 100 pounds, Ginsburg has kept in shape with the help of a personal trainer, Bryant Johnson. She works out twice a week at 7 p.m. and can do 20 "male" push-ups.

"Even though I tend to get consumed by my work and won't let it go — that's why I work long hours into the night — when it's time to be with Bryant, everything stops and I go down to the gym," she says.

Far from one-dimensional, Ginsburg is known by her friends and colleagues as a lover of art, music, even clothes and shoes. Her chambers are adorned with Josef Albers paintings on loan from the Smithsonian Museum. Her love of opera is so deep that she is lecturing in Upstate New York this summer on the depiction of law in opera.

"She's got so much personality, and people just don't see that," Blatt says. "She's a role model in every respect — the mother, the shopper, the traveler, the entertainer and the great jurist."

That jurist isn't going away anytime soon.

"As long as I can do the job full-steam, I would like to stay here," she says. "Last term was a good example. I didn't write any slower. I didn't think any slower. I have to take it year by year at my age, and who knows what could happen next year? Right now, I know I'm OK. Whether that will be true at the end of next term, I can't say."

Though justices traditionally try to retire with a kindred spirit in the White House to nominate their successors — something Ginsburg says she has in President Obama — she nods when reminded that the next president could be a woman.

"Yes," the women's rights pioneer says, "and wouldn't that be fantastic."