winklevi, as i call them, have thrown their lot in with the idea that bitcoin needs be regulated. that is their view. they are trying to build these etf exchanges that will play well with regulators and try to gain confidence in that way. both their projects have been a long time in development and are not yet out there. the exchange called gemini, the etf, will run under the ticker symbol coin. it they seem very dedicated to this. i think there is the possibility that their projects, they have every intention to bring that out there. at this point, they have a lot of competition. that is the toughest and for them. host: from new york city, our guest is nathaniel popper of the new york times. his first book, "digital gold,"

is out. we hear from jim in illinois. good morning. caller: i have a couple questions. i am curious as to how the supply of bitcoin is managed in terms of the volume of bitcoins that are in existence. i was going to ask about how currency exchange rates are set for bitcoin. but from your previous answer about the buying and selling on the open market, it sounds like the value may be set on sort of the way a stock price is set. can you elaborate on how a bitcoin is valued? guest: our site with the first question asked to how many bitcoins exist and how is that limited, regulated. the bitcoin software, released in early 2009, it is run by all

the people who join into it. everyone who joined in downloads the software, which includes a set of rules, which is how bitcoin works. some are very complicated and technical. one of the central roles to the bitcoin system is how they will be generated and how many will be generated. the limits set from day one was that 21 million bitcoins will eventually be released to the people who use the system it was prescribed how they would be released. about every 10 minutes, a new lock a big one would be released to someone using the network. it is essentially a lottery. from day one, there were zero bitcoins. 10 minutes in, the first block was released and someone got

that. that has been going on since then. it jobs in half, the number release, every four years. now, every 10 minutes 20 five bitcoins are released to someone on the network. we are about halfway through the process of all the bitcoins being created. it is anticipated we will hit the 21 million number in 2040. that scarcity, that system are releasing bitcoins, was designed to create this sense of scarcity, sort of like gold. the idea there will only be a limited quantity, and you can always tell if the apart from anything else, just like you can tell gold apart from any other metal. that was part of the design of the system. giving them away was designed to

get people to join in. that incentive is viewed as one of the brilliant elements of it. we are moving towards that 21 million and we are about halfway through. once people get the bitcoins, they join the network, you can do whatever you want with them. you can hold onto them, send them to other people. you can send them to people for nothing or you could request a price. that is generally how it works now. people go to exchanges and they say i have 10 bitcoins, i am willing to sell them for $250. someone comes along and says i have 10 bitcoins, i am willing to pay $230. they strike a deal. but it is like the way stocks are priced and the way the dollar is priced. the price of the dollar against

the euro and the yen is set on the open market. bitcoin prices are set in much the same way but they move around a lot more. host: we're from alice in colorado. go ahead. caller: i am getting to learn more about the coin from this program. since we have legalized marijuana, and our transactions are done in cash and we cannot use ranks, because it is against federal law, i wondered if they could do something through the bitcoin industry. i know you say it is not really secure at this point, that there could be a lot of corruption but to me they pay people in cash, everything is secured in cash. that is scary to me. to have that in my neighborhood. guest: that is a great question.

the question you have is at the front edge of the coin -- of bitcoin. i am not an expert on this. i know stuff is going on and people are going -- playing with his intersection between legalized marijuana and bitcoin. people are saying this is enough of a controversial industry on its own, we do not eat to get involved with another controversial industry. but people have been making moves. you are right to notice there is an opportunity there. bitcoin, the way he has been able to take off so far, is in places where the existing financial setup is not working. i mentioned argentina as one of the first cases where ordinary people began using bitcoin. bitcoin is still hard to use. you have to have a good reason

to want to use it if you're going to use it. that all cash economy that has surrounded legalized marijuana is one opportunity for that. the original usage of bitcoin perhaps what made it most famous, was an online drug market called the silk road, where marijuana and a lot of harder drugs were available for coin -- bitcoin. that was a case in which the need for it, the alternative was so bad, that people were willing to play with the experimental element of bitcoin and take that risk. the alternative buying jugs on some street corner, was worse. host: some twitter comments. @cspanwj is our twitter handle. jan said that people would just get greedy with bitcoin.

another one says bitcoin may become viable in emerges in -- in emerging markets and rural areas without a financial banking structure was cell phones. also a question on what is the official obama administration policy on bitcoin? guest: the obama administration, i do not think of the white house it self has said much about bitcoin. the treasury department, which is part of the administration, has been looking at this. they have been slow to act, but to the degree they have said anything, they said this is an interesting technology and we are looking at it and we the existing rules are enough for now, but they have let it develop slowly. an interesting note is the administration did recently take on as one of its tech guru advisors, a princeton professor named ed felten who has been

invited -- excited and involved with bitcoin. he has been a math and computer guy fascinated by the new things bitcoin makes possible. this is not a guy saying everyone should go out and buy bitcoin, but it is interesting they brought on someone who is in this movement and is excited about bitcoin. host: we hear from dan in wisconsin. good morning. caller: people have to realize that, i believe bitcoin was introduced by the u.s. government as a one world currency. people have no clue where bitcoin came from. there is no one listed as the official person who invented bitcoin. they can take your money anytime they want. the u.s. government can take

your money or a can be hacked. host: we hear from nathaniel popper on the founding of bitcoin. guest: it is possible, but i would say that it is very unlikely. there is no sign the u.s. government has any control over this. in fact, the opposite. the u.s. government has tried to gain control at various points and has tried to get more inside access to the system. that possibility is out there. there is someone listed on the internet as the inventor of bitcoin. that name is satoshi nakamoto. that is a name on top of the original paper that describes bitcoin, attached to the software that brought the bitcoin system into existence. it became clear that satoshi nakamoto was just e-mailing with people.

he would never call people, chat with people. it became clear this was probably a pseudonym for someone. after two years of communicating with some of the other users just as bitcoin was getting going, he disappeared. host: you mean he disappeared from online? guest: exactly. that is the only existence had online, e-mailing with people. it is one of the fascinating elements of the bitcoin story. you have this anonymous creator. there have been many efforts to tie satoshi to people in the real world to essentially find the wizard behind the curtain of bitcoin. most have failed. in the course of my writing, i encounter the guy who a lot of people talk about as the most likely candidate to be satoshi nakamoto. this is a guy who had been working on similar projects for

decades before this had -- released similar software that did not quite work. a computer programmer in california, grew up in washington state. but it is still a mystery and one of the many fascinating elements of bitcoin, that we do not fully know who created this. but we know the name satoshi nakamoto. host: san antonio -- i am sorry that is not san antonio. good morning paul. caller: inc. you for having me. -- thank you for having me. happy birthday to the army. the armed services birthday. my dad and my best friend and my new wife were army. that said, the differences between that and gold and

similar compromises with identity theft and how they are looking into that situation to make sure that it is not compromised and so forth and the other thing i had to do a report on high school in nixon. great reporter. inc. you for your time. host: -- guest: the difference with gold -- my title indicates "digital gold." this was envisioned as somewhat of a digital equivalent to gold. we are getting again at the layers of bitcoin. scarcity is the thing that makes it like gold. the other thing that makes it like gold is the fact that -- every bitcoin is: to another bitcoin like every ounce of gold

is equivalent to another ounce of gold. that is one of the reasons people have viewed it as his way and placed store money. the advantage over gold is that you can move it around the world instantly. with gold, when the french national bank wanted to get their gold back, they had to essentially get a specially equipped ship to move it across the ocean. moving gold is not easy. it is not as easy to break it down into its constituent bits, whereas bitcoin can be divided into eight decimal points with the click of a cursor. it is like an easier to use gold for the digital era without the same as a call backing and the sense that you can hold in your hands or to make jewelry out of

it if everything else failed. host: in your book, some of the curtains or in -- some of the concern of early supporters, you write that the problem to libertarians was there ingrained belief that money has to be backed by something with physical value like gold. one of the patron saints of old books, carl manga, argued that all successful money arose from commodities. how did they overcome that? guest: there are different theories about what successful money needs to have. this gets to the heart of it. one argument about successful money says as i wrote, has to, from some commodity that had value before. that is why cigarettes are

viewed as having taken off money. if all else fails, you still have the cigarettes. if all else fails with gold, you can still make jewelry with it. a much more popular hypothesis about what makes successful money these days is that money is a centrally a ledger, a way to keep track of who has what and who owes what to someone else. the theory goes that gold took off because it was essentially a ledger. you knew it was one piece of the ledger of all the outstanding gold. and by wearing it around your neck, you were wearing your piece of the ledger. if someone else had a piece of the ledger, you could tell they owned that. banking systems since then have

been based on ledger. our money today, most has no physical form. it is just entries in a ledger. bitcoin to the idea of a ledger. some who support bitcoin say it is more perfect than the current banking system, then gold. according to this theory, money does not have to, from any commodity. it is not have to, from anything with intrinsic value. the fact that it is a ledger, that is the value. i think that is the way libertarians who have gone behind bitcoin have argued that this is going to work, that this will be as successful as gold. host: michael in dallas, texas. good morning. caller: i am sorry if you answer this question already but is the u.s. government or other governments considering developing their own digital currency is -- currencies.

guest: ecuador has gone the farthest in saying they want to move their national currency on to the bitcoin technology. they wanted to be separate from bitcoin. that is the furthest you have heard any government going. the winklevoss twins, when i talked to them last, expressed their believe the dollar would eventually end up on the bitcoin ledger. in the case of bitcoin, the ledger is known as the block chain, a record of all the bitcoin transactions that have happened. by looking at the bitcoin block chain, you can see every bitcoin ever created, you can see when money was transferred, and you can add up however many bitcoins a particular address had. the idea was you could basically

attach things to a piece of bitcoin. you could attach ownership of a particular stock to a bitcoin so that when you traded the bitcoin, you are also trading the stock. you can even break it down so that one millionth of a bitcoin is essentially a contract that says i own this stock or that i own this dollar or this $100. this is how some people imagined national currencies could move to a block chain. the value, the believe that should happen, is driven by the math and cryptography that underlines the bitcoin system and that some people think is more secure and stable than the existing financial arrangement. so far, it has not proven to be so, but i think there is some

hope that the math and cryptography that makes bitcoin work could be more secure than the systems we have, where j.p. morgan or credit suisse or bank of america is in charge of the ledger and you have to trust bank of america to handle that properly. banks themselves have been vulnerable to hacking attacks. they generally have not lost money, but that sort of thing is this conversation going, over whether it would be better to have a cryptographic solution like bitcoin. host: washington, d.c., 14 -- jo aquin. caller: i was hoping you could elaborate more on security. bitcoin is built essentially a startup. all of these companies have gone down due to cyber attacks and

lost a lot of money for themselves and for people starting to use bitcoin. they may not feel it is more of a risk area can you talk more about that threat landscape and some challenges they have to overcome? maybe what the winklevoss twins are doing to make that it'll currency more secure. guest: the strength and weakness of bitcoin comes down to the fact that the ownership of your bitcoin and your bitcoin address is tied up in this private key which is essentially a string of 64 letters and numbers. it is unique to you and your bitcoin address. if you control that, you can unlock your bitcoin addressed without a third party and spend your bitcoins. if you keep those 64 digit

secure, your money is secure. no one can hack in to your address. but if you have those 64 digits written down and leave in a cafe and someone gets a hold of it they have your bitcoins and have access to your bitcoin address. if you live it on your desktop and someone asked computer, they can similarly get access to your bitcoins and transfer them. a lot of what is happening around bitcoins security is about securing that address. increasingly, people are moving to what are known as multi-signature laws, or you need to ban secret keys. you have one and maybe a company a bitcoin bank for a security company keeps the other one and make sure that if you sign with your address, it is really you signing with it. it is getting these increasingly

sophisticated security regimes people are coming up with. then you move back towards the old system where you have that third-party have to rely on. winklevoss twins are trying to come up with their exchange and security is a big part of what they are working on. that is part of the reason they want regulation. they want regulators to say you guys are doing this right, you'll have good security, your securing clients properly. by that comes with the regulations that we started this whole thing talking about. it is a difficult moment that bitcoin is at. it has this sort of super security that if you do not have that 64 digit password, you cannot get the bitcoins. but once you have it, you have total access. it is something everyone in the bitcoin community is working on. the danger and promise of bitcoin.

host: do you your cell phone bitcoins? guest: at the time, we made the decision this is like covering a company and owning stock in the company. you did not want personally investment. if you're covering apple, you do not want to own apple stock and worry about your stocks can go up and down. i own enough that i can play with it and understand the components of the system, but not enough where i have financial interest. host: injured in san antonio hello. caller: hello. i want to thank you. i am calling from a hospital bed and san antonio. i heard about bitcoin mining. and you elaborate on that and let us know what that entails. guest: bitcoin mining is the way

people refer to the process of creating new bitcoins. a reference to gold-mining. you do work to dig up old, today up new bitcoins. the way the system works is new bitcoins are released every 10 minutes or so to people using the system. essentially, what i mentioned earlier, it is like a lottery. people using the system enter in a sort of lottery to win bitcoin s. the way the lottery works is you need very fast computers to essentially make a lot of lottery gases -- guesses. the more you make, the more you can win. you could do that with a laptop or early on, but now there are so many people computing -- competing, you now need specialized hardware made

exclusively for bitcoin mining. it is expensive and it has become dominated a few companies that have gotten good at manufacturing these special chips and getting cheap electricity. a lot of the bitcoin mining is happening in china, where there is cheap hardware, and also cheap electricity if you have a connection at a local coal energy factory, you can just throw your lines into the cold factory and you have free energy coming into your bitcoin mining machine. it is no longer something people can do easily from home. this sounds a little far-fetched and absurd -- why are people buying expensive hardware just to take part in a lottery. the twist on the lottery is that in the course of doing the lottery, these computers are

essentially doing the bookkeeping for the network. they are registering new transactions as they come in determining people have the amount of money they need to do the transactions. essentially, this system is doing the accounting for the system. the more people involved, the stronger and more impervious the system is to hackers and outsiders trying to gain access to the system. there is a method to the madness. host: in the book "digital gold: bitcoin starring natalie

portman. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> good afternoon. i am a partner in the supreme court and appellate practice and a longtime member of acs, dating back over a decade to when i was a student. i first became involved at acs because i believed in its mission. i believe that law should the a force to improve the lives of all people.

it's a privilege to support acs in its efforts to make that happen. i've developed a deep appreciation for everything my acs membership has given me including countless professional development opportunities and a fantastic network of colleagues and friends. i'm deeply grateful to acs for the opportunity to introduce our final featured speakers of the convention, to extraordinary jurists. justice ruth bader ginsburg's biography is well-known. before her appointment to the u.s. supreme court she served on the u.s. court of appeals. prior to becoming a judge, she was a law professor at rutgers and columbia university. over her decades of service, she's been an unwavering advocate for women, both on the bench and as one of the founds of the women's rights project for the aclu, where she served as general counsel and on the national board of directors for nearly a decade. i had the extraordinary honor of clerk wrg justice two ginsburg which was as amazing and life

changing an experience as you would expect. among my fondest memories of that year were the champagne and cupcake birthday parties that the justice would host for each of her clerks and secretaries. so fully aware of just how crazy it is to have a birthday party with ruth bader ginsburg, my co-clerks and i would plan for days in advance, trying to come up with a perfect list of questions to ask her and we did pretty well. we heard amazing stories about her summers in sweden, where she was learning and writing about swedish civil procedure, we heard about her first supreme court arguments, her confirmation hearings, and her beloved husband, marty, a distinguished tax attorney and chef supreme whose love and support for the justice is legendary. if tumblr had existed before he passed away, no doubt he would have started the notorious r.b.g. blog himself.

[cheers and applause] when the clerkship ended, i had a deep sense of remorse when i thought about the questions we didn't get to ask and the stories we didn't ghet to hear. this is a dream come true for me, one more chance to hear about the incredible life and career of ruth bader ginsburg, with the best interlo cutor available. he's an expert in constitutional law and the supreme court. he was a popular teacher winning u.c. berkley's law distinguished professor award and became the associate dean. he was also on the board of directors for a.c.s. for a number of years. [cheers and applause]

but long before all of that, justice lew was a law clerk, first on the d.c. circuit, a for a long-tile friend of a.c.s. and then for justice ginsburg. he is perfect for this job because i know he too has a long list of questions left over from the chamber birthday parties. please join me in welcoming justice lew and justice bader ginsburg. [cheers and applause] >> welcome, everybody, thank you for being here on a saturday afternoon. thank you also to justice girnsburg, it's a busy time on the court, as june often is, so

thank you for spending time if us here. you're now finishing your 22nd term on the supreme court. a lot of people noticed that in recent years you have had quite a substantial public presence. you have a huge fan base everywhere you go. people call you a rock star, an icon. there's an emoticon that looks like you. there are t-shirts with the notorious r.b.g. name. some of the some of them also say i love r.b.g. and then there's my personal favorite which is, you can't spell truth without ruth. [cheers and applause]

and then there are young women who have tattoos of your likeness. now that's love. that's real. i mean, all of this, i think, is unusual for a supreme court justice. justice scalia gets out a lot too, but i don't think there's anyone with a justice scalia tattoo, not even at the federalist society. [laughter] so i want to just start by asking you, how did this happen? justice ginsburg: it's amazing. to think of me, an icon at 82. i owe it all to a law student who started a tumblr, the notorious r.b.g.

and at first i didn't quite know what to make of this. i didn't even know who notorious b.i.g. was. [laughter] when my law clerks explained to me you two have something in common. you were both born and bred in brooklyn, new york. i should explain right away, a number of my feminist -- a criticism a number of my feminist friends have raised. ginsburg comes before scalia alphabetically, why isn't it -- scalia ginsberg?

scalia was appointed some years before ginsburg. justice liu: there's going to be a biography called "the notorious r.b.g." and there's a bio-pic coming too. it's called "on the basis of sex" with natalie portman starring as you. are you in on these projects? justice ginsburg: i can't claim credit for notorious r.b.g. but i like it and so do my grandchildren. "on the basis of sex," that's what the biopic is called, i have a nephew who is a script writer and he asked if he could

write a script about a case in which marty and i were involved in 1971. and i said, yes, you would like to spend your time doing that, i hope it will be paired as the turning point case in the supreme court. the case was charles e. moss commissioner of internal revenue, charles e. moss was a man who took guide care of his mother, though she was 93 at the time, we argued the case in the 10th circuit. this is his story. there was a business deduction apublic to believe a woman or a divorced man. it covered elder care.

charles e. moss didn't get the deduction because he was a married man. he appeared pro se in the tax court and his brief wascism policity. if i were a dutiful daughter, i would get this deduction. i'm a dutiful son. it makes no sense. one day, marty came into a room where i was working on away on something i was writing and he said, ruth, read this. i turned to him and i said, it's a tax advance sheet, i don't read tax cases. he said read this one and told the story of charles and said, let's take it. marty would write the tax part and i would write the constitutional law part. so a part of this is about the case and about our argument in the 10th circuit in denver.

and then it includes the aclu and some women who were saying the same things that i was saying in the 1970's at a time when no one was prepared to listen. so dorothy kenyon had a role in this. i think if we're -- i think it will go into production in the beginning of 2016 and maybe by the end of the year it will be out. natalie portman came to talk to me about this and we had a very good conversation and one thing interesting that she insisted on, it held up the project for a while. she said, i want the director to be a woman. there are not enough women in this industry, there are many talented out there. and now they do have a woman director. [cheers and applause]

justice liu: you mention marty. he's been mentioned many times. let me take you back a little bit. for many years, i think, you've been described as shy and reserved. especially compared to your gregarious and very loving husband marty, who was, as kelsey said, an outstanding chef and always very quick with a joke. some people called him a serial wisecracker. but first of all, do you think marty would be surprised at your celebrity today? justice ginsburg: i think he would be delighted. he was always my biggest booster. justice liu: i saw a picture of you and marty in fort sill which was not long after you were marry. you met marty in your first year of college at cornell, is that right? you said in the past he was the

first boy you ever dated who cared that you had a brain. justice ginsburg: i like -- yes. justice liu: i like that. and you had two kids and a two-career marriage two lawyer in fact, which was unusual at the time. can you describe a little about that period and what kind of social pressures you faced with respect to your marriage you family life, and your career? justice ginsburg: the big change in the time from my first child, jane born in 1955, and the second one, james, in 1965, when jane was small, there were very few women who worked outside the home.

by the time james was born, it wasn't unusual to have a two-earner family. and what was it like? well, it's hard for today's students to imagine what the world was like for women not all that long ago. i think when i started law teaching in 1963, maybe 3% of the lawyers in america were women. there was no title 7 when i graduated from law school. so they didn't want any lady lawyers. they had a woman once and she was dreadful. i'll tell you, santa day -- i'll tell you sandra day o'connor's story. she graduated from law school, top of her class, a few years ahead of me. she couldn't get a job. she volunteered to work for a

county attorney and said, if you think i'm good enough, after four months, you can put me on the payroll. that's how she got her job. my first job was as a district court, federal district court law clerk. how did i get that job? jerry was in charge of clerkships. he called every judge on the second circuit, every judge in the eastern district and the southern district of new york. the answer was, well we might take a chance on a woman but we can't risk a mother, her daughter is 4 years old. so jerry called judge andy palmieri, who always took his clerks from colombia -- from columbia law school. and the judge explained, well, her record is good but sometimes we work on saturdays, even on a sunday. how would i count on her? jerry said, give her a chance and if she doesn't work out then there's a young man in her

class who will leave his wall street law firm and accept the clerkship. so that's the carrot. then there's the stick. the stick was if you don't give her a chance, i will never recommend another columbia law student to you. i got that and all the women of my generation, when you got the job, you did it as well, probably better than anyone else, so the second job wasn't hard but opening that first door was difficult. justice liu: now, of course, you have had many clerks yourself who were parents at the time. is that right? is that unusual at the court today, do you think? justice ginsburg: not today.

i have had a number of clerks with two children. the first i hired who was a primary custodian of his children was a man. david post who is now teaching at temple law school. in his application he explained he was going to georgetown at night, his wife was an economist, i think for the international monetary fund or the world bank, and so she had a full-time day job he took care of the children during the day. so that was a dream, fathers who care about children as much as mothers. there was something else about him that made him irresistible. his writing sample was not just a usual brief. it was his first year writing essay and it was on the theory

of contract as played out in wagner's ring cycle. [laughter] justice liu: so -- that's actually a good segue to next question. you seem -- you've seen lots of change and transformations from the time -- since the time you co-founded the aclu women's rights project in 19 2, four decades later until today. because of the work you did there, we now have the elimination of most overt forms of gender discrimination.

from your vantage point, what do you think are the most pressing challenges left now for gender equality? justice ginsburg: i don't think the meaning of feminism has changed. it has always been that girls should have the same opportunity to dream, to aspire, and achieve, to do whatever their god-given talents enable them to do, as boys. and that there should be no place where there isn't a welcome mat for women. people misunderstand what feminism is. i know in some quarters it's called the f word. but that's what it's all about, women and men working together should help make the society a better place than it is now. [cheers and applause]

justice liu: current challenges? justice ginsburg: as you said, goodwin, all the overt things are gone, there are a couple that the supreme court has left standing and that's unfortunate. but for the most part, the parts of society that were riddled with sexism have changed. there was legislation and other changes to push that along. what is left, what is harder to get by is unconscious bias. sometimes there is a technique to overcome unconscious bias.

my example is the symphony. so they had the idea to drop a curtain so the people judging didn't know if it was a woman or man. and with that, almost overnight women started to show up in symphony orchestras in numbers. i was telling this story last summer at the castleton festival and a young violinist said to me, you left one thing out. he said, not only do we audition behind a curtain but we audition shoeless. that can't be duplicated in every area but it's hard to get at.

my favorite case in that line was a title 7 case from the 1970's, the lawyer was my colleague at columbia, harriet grant. it was against at&t for not promoting women to middle management jobs. there were several criteria that women did at least as well up until the last test and that was called the total person test. it consisted of an interviewer meeting the candidate, and then doing an evaluation. women flunked disproportionately at that stage. and why? because the person conducting the interview was generally a white male and anyone who was different made the interviewer feel slightly uncomfortable.

so if a person looked like him he was comfortable. but with a member of a minority group, or a woman, they were strangers. and it wasn't a case of i'm deliberately setting out to avoid promoting women. it wasn't that at all. it was unconscious bias. that operated. justice liu: you now sit on a court with three women on it. i actually sit on a court that has a majority of women on it, including a woman as chief justice. do you think that the law would be much different if there were, say, four or five women on the u.s. supreme court? justice ginsburg: i think it's pretty good that we have three there. three makes a big difference

because we're all over the bench. i'm on the middle because i've been around so long. justice kay began is at my left. justice sotomayor at my right. if any of you have come to watch the show at the court, you know that my newest colleagues are not shrinking violets. they're very active. they're very active in questioning. i've often quoted what gene koren from the minnesota court said, at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same decision. but there are some cases that i think would have come out the other way if there were five women or more. and one of them is lily led better's case. every woman understood lily's problem. whether it's the carhart case.

two cases involving children whose parents were not married they could become citizens if their mother was a u.s. citizen but not if the father. the supreme court was wrong about that, twice. so i think it's fair to predict that the result would have been different. but for the most part, in the years that david souter and i served on the court together, we were more alike than any two other justices, even more than justice thomas and justice scalia. [laughter] [applause] justice liu: i look forward to the souter-ginsburg opera. [laughter]

a couple of months ago you appeared on "time" magazine's 100 most influential people in the world list, that's quite an honor. we have some pictures of that. you should see the lovely picture they have of you from the first year at cornell, it's a beautiful picture. the inscription that accompanied your listing was written by your colleague, justice scalia, who said this, i quote, ruth bader ginsburg has had two distinguished legal careers, either one of which alone entitle her to be one of "time's" 100. one, of course, is your career as a judge, first on the d.c. circuit and now of course on the supreme court. the other is your earlier career as a professor and lawyer. so i guess i'll ask you, what did you learn from your experience as a lawyer that prepared you for your role as a judge?

justice ginsburg: the importance of having a sense of humor. and some advice i told many audiences, it was the advice that my mother-in-law gave to me on our wedding day, marty and i were married in the home in which he had grown up and his mother said, dear, i'd like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage. and that is, it helps sometimes to be a little hard of hearing. [cheers and applause] and i find that such good advice. [laughter] marty was a very funny fellow but in dealing with my colleagues even. [laughter]

justice liu: you were nominated for the supreme court in june of 1993, to fill the seat vacated by justice byron white. some pictures of that. and you were confirmed by the senate exactly 57 days later on august 10, 1993, by a vote of 96-3. must have been nice. i'm just saying. [laughter] [laughter] [applause] anyway. other than the happy outcome what do you consider the most memorable part of your confirmation process?

justice ginsburg: the bipartisan spirit that existed in that congress, probably my biggest supporter was orrin hatch. my biggest problem, well, the white house, preparing me for the confirmation process they would put questions like, you were on the aclu board in the year so and so. and that year they passed resolution x. how did you vote and would you defend that position today? and my answer was, stop, there is nothing that you can do to persuade me to bad mouth the aclu. [applause] i think they are a vital institution of our society. and then, and this would never happen today but not a single question was raised about my aclu connection. justice breyer was similarly fortunate the next year. how did we get back to that?

i don't know what the magic would be. i was the beneficiary of what had happened in the clarence thomas nomination. so the committee was embarrassed. they had no women for the thomas nomination so they added two for mine. and they had a meeting with the committee before the public hearing. it was supposed to be anything bad on my record they could bring out and i'd have a chance to answer before we went public. in all my records, nothing in the f.b.i. files was questionable. so they said, tell us what you think we should do to improve

the confirmation process. at that point, i hadn't yet been confirmed so i was somewhat hesitant. [laughter] i still have, to this day a supply of strom thurmond key chains that he gave me, voted against me when i was nominated for the d.c. circuit but he was in my corner for the supreme court nomination. justice liu: so since being on the bench, on the u.s. supreme court, you've been a very vigorous voice on a whole range of equal protection cases, not only sex discrimination but in the racial discrimination area most recently in the shell bowe -- shelby county case you had a very lively dissent about the voting rights act. i want to ask you, you at times compared the interesting progress that's been made so

rapidly on questions of discrimination based on sexual orientation, contrasting that with our more enduring difficulties with racial inequality. what do you think explains the difference in how sticky the issue of racial inequality has been? justice ginsburg: i think that when gay people began to stand up and say, this is who i am when ha happened, people looked around and -- when that happened, people looked around and it was my next door neighbor of whom i was very fond, my child's best friend, even my child. they were people who belonged to our community. it wasn't, still today, there is a high degree of segfwation in

living patterns in the united states -- segregation in living patterns in the united states new york schools. so i think it's the difference -- in the united states, in schools. so i think it's the difference when it comes to race, for gay people, once we find out they are people we know and we love and we respect and they are part of us, i think that's accounts for the difference. during the years when gay people hid who they were, there was a kind of discrimination that started to break down very rapidly once they no longer hid in the corner.

justice liu: can you tell us what went into your thought process on the voting rights case? that was a much-quoted dissent your famous line about throwing an umbrella away in the rainstorm because you're in the getting wet. tell us about your thinking process in that case. justice ginsburg: it was very much, the view that i had of a school segregation case some years before. i think it was -- it was about jefferson county, kentucky, that for years and years had been under a federal court decree to desegregate. and then the court said, now the county is up to speed they don't have to be under the thumb of the federal judge anymore, so i'm going to dissolve the injunction.

the people in that county said we liked the plan that was kept in place by the injunction. we would like to keep it. and the supreme court said no, you can't, because that's deliberate discrimination on the basis of race. in the shelby county case, it was one of the most successful pieces of legislation congress ever passed and passed by overwhelming majorities on both sides of the aisle. the voting rights act, i think most of you know, worked this way. if you had had a bad record of keeping people from voting, then any change you made in the system had to be precleared either by a three-judge district court in the district of columbia or by the attorney general.

it was a mechanism to get out. if you showed you had a clean record for x number of years you could bail out. and you could bail out on a county by county basis, you didn't have to wait until the whole state was up to speed. they had a built in mechanism for getting out. the supreme court held that the coverage formula was outdated. that from 1965 until 2000 states had changed so congress had to redo the form lafment but practically, what senator or what representative is going to stand up and say, my state or my county still discriminates? it was impossible. it was impossible to come up with a new formula for that reason. and yet there was the bailout mechanism that would work when they had been -- when there had been a genuine change.

politically, it wasn't impossible to do the kind of revision that was needed and so this most successful piece of legislation is largely inoperative. justice liu: you've written a number of memorable dissents in recent years. you wrote a separate opinion in the affordable care act case the personal clause, you wrote a vigorous defense in the hobby lobby case and ledbetter as well, which congress listened to and acted on. we talked about carhart, the abortion case, and then title 7 cases like the ball state case about who is a supervisor under title 7. so i think you may know that "saturday night live" recently did a couple of skits about you on their "weekend update." this

is slide nine if you could show them. the comedian, kate mckinnon, plays you as a hip, sassy judge, dishing out these feisty one-liners and then dancing after every one. [laughter] i'm not going to ask you to dance for us. but feel free to bring it if you -- if you've got it today. what i really want to ask is how do you go about writing your dissents in terms of tone and style? your tone is actually not sassy. it's respectful. but it also makes a point. how do you think about the right balance? we have a lot of colorful writing from the supreme court which spans a broad range of sfiles. how do you think about yours?

justice ginsburg: when it's time and i'm on the dissent side i try to have the dissent drafted before i get the majority opinion. that i way i don't get trapped into writing not so, not system of i tell the story affirmatively. and the biggest putdown i have for the court's opinion is to deal with it in footnotes. you'll remember from your time clerking for me, it was quite a term, that was the year of bush v. gore. all this business began that year. people said, i dissent. people were struck that i didn't say i respectfully dissent. i never say respectfully dissent. [laughter] think of my colleagues who have just criticized the court's opinion, from stevens, profoundly misguide.

or from scalia, opinion is not to be taken seriously. then after you say that, you show no respect at all. so i never used respectfully. i would say i dissent or more often, for the reasons stated, i would affirm the decision of the court of appeals or if it came out the other way, reverse the decision. justice liu: now because of your seniority on the court, you have the assignment power, both in majority opinions when you happen to be senior and in dissenting opinions when you happen to be senior. what goes into your thought process? justice ginsburg: we're not majorities yet. when we split 5-4, i generally decide it. i succeeded to the role that john paul stevens had when you were chloricing for me. -- clerking for me.

i think there's a consensus in the case of health care, hobby lobby, shelby county, that as the most senior person on the dissent side, i should write the dissent. for the rest, i try to be as fair as i can, to distribute them evenly and there's been much grumbling from my colleagues about that. justice liu: when you think about your two decades now on the supreme court, do you think there are things that you feel more sure footed about today than you did when you first began? justice ginsburg: well, i was a new judge, i had been on the d.c. circuit for 13 years so i wasn't too quiet, except the very first sitting in october.

i asked a lot of questions at oral argument. my then-chief, for whom i came to have great affection, decided i had been a little smart alecy, so at the end of the sitting instead of giving me what is traditional for the junior justice, that is an easy unanimous decision he, gave me a most miserable erisa case, where the court divided 6-3. i went to the justice to complain, i said, he's not supposed to do this, is he? he said -- they said, ruth, just do it. just do it. get your opinion in circulation before he makes the next findings, otherwise you're likely to get another dull case. that was her attitude. whenever was put on her plate she just did it. that was the beginning of my relationship with the old chief and in that first year, it was interesting that you mentioned

the supervisor case, in my first year on the bench, the question was, there are no supervisors and they are therefore unable to organize under the nlrb. i said of course they are employees, not supervisors. but that was the fore people. coming around the other way, now, it's very hard to be a supervisor under the bench decision. justice liu: you mentioned justice o'connor. when you arrived at the court in 1993, you were only the second woman ever to serve on the highest court. your colleague, justice o'connor was appointed by president reagan 12 years earlier.

when you think back to that time and your experience for 22 years, working with a very wide range of colleagues, what do you think you learned about the art of persuasion? is it possible to persuade one's colleagues? and if, how? i'm really interested. [laughter] justice ginsburg: possible, yes. is it something that happens often? no. i can remember one dissent, john paul stevens assigned to me, dissent came around, the vote at conference was 7-2. he the opinion came out 6-3. but the two had swelled to six. now that was some heady experience.

turning the dissent into a comfortable majority opinion. we're trying to persuade each other all the time. so if a conference vote is one way, you try to write your position as persuasively as you can and hope to be able to peel off one or another vote. but most of the time that doesn't happen. do we try? yes, we do. i can say with assurance up to this very term, when people, it's closely divided, the author of the majority or the dissent is trying to pick up one more vote. justice liu: in your experience, how does that persuasion happen? is it on paper? or in person? or how do the justices -- apart from sitting around the conference table which happens after argument.

justice ginsburg: it is largely on paper. read my dissent. read it carefully. you should be persuaded by it. [laughter] there's no vote trading, there's no if you side with me in this case, i'll side with you -- that never happens. justice liu: we mentioned chief justice rehnquist a couple of times. it's well known you have a warm relationship with justice scalia as kind of an interesting polar opposite. but it's perhaps less well known that you also had a very warm relationship with chief justice rehnquist, who among other things took the meaningful step of assigning you the v.m.i. decision and eventually himself wrote the majority decision in the hitt case for the provision of the fmla.

can you describe your relationship with chief justice rehnquist? how did the two of you have such good chemistry? justice ginsburg: i would say it's cool at first. but sandra and i were talking about what to do about the ladies room. the court is a very traditional institution, so it was the ladies' dining room. we came to him, we would like to rename it the natalie cornell rehnquist dining room. he had a very happy marriage his wife sadly died. he couldn't resist that it be renamed for her. he had seen her suffering from cancer.

the year that i had my first bout with cancer, he could not have been more supportive. after the surgery, he called me into his chamber and he said ruth, i'll give you something light for this assignment. i said, no, not this one, i'm ok now. wait until the chemotherapy and radiation start, then i'd like to be kept light. he said which case do you want? he said, that's the one i was going to assign to myself. [laughter] but he assigned it to me. then i watched his relationship with his granddaughters, when his daughter janet, who had been divorced, he was kind of a substitute father to those girls. he wanted them to keep in tune with their swedish heritage. he would take them to the festival at the swedish ambassador'sres.

-- residence. and they loved him dearly. that was a side of him a lot of people didn't see. so i consider me -- the chief in mid passage. i brought home the decision in family and medical leave act, i brought home the decision and marty said, did you write this? but it was the chief. justice liu: so when you think back cross these couple decades, what do you think is the biggest changes you've seen in the court, whether it's public perceptions of the court, the lawyers who appear before you or the nature of the docket, what do you think are the biggest transformations? justice ginsburg: right now the public -- has anything to do with government so the supreme court has slipped but not really as much as congress -- as congress has.

[laughter] justice liu: that's an understatement. justice ginsburg: the big change in the court composition came not when we had a new chief but when justice o'connor left us. and i have said many times that the year that she left, every time i was among four rather than five, i would have been five, four if she remained with us. she was a big loss in many ways. justice liu: met me ask you sort of another big picture question about your approach to judging. i think many observers -- and we're now seeing some books being written about your corpus of work -- many people described your approach to judging as incrementalist. and indeed at your confirmation

hearing, here's what you said. isn't it terrible people quote your confirmation hearing back to you? [laughter] justice liu: in your case it's very, very -- it's very good. you said, my approach -- this is you -- is neither liberal nor conservative. rather, it's rooted in the place of the judiciary of judges, in our democratic society. so in other occasions you have spoken out against judicial activism noting that current court is the most activist in history in terms of willingness to overturn legislation. you've written long ago that roe vs. wade perhaps went too far too fast. in contrast to the step by step approach that characterized much of your litigation approach as a lawyer. so i just want to ask, have your views about gradualism changed at all in the course of your two decades on the supreme court or

has it reinforced your sense that gradualism is the right approach? justice ginsburg: i don't know if i would use the word gradualism. i do think it's healthy for our system if the court and the congress can be in dialogue. i think of some great examples of that. when the court in the 1970's said discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not discrimination on the basis of sex, there was a coalition formed to pass the pregnancy discrimination act. people from all parts of the political spectrum were on board with that and that was repeated again with lilly ledbetter. if it caused a statutory determination there could be a healthy back and forth between the supreme court and the political branches.

let me put it this way, the court is not in a popularity contest and it should not be influenced by today's headlines, by the weather of today, but as paul said, inevitably it will be affected by the climate of the era. i think that's part of the explanation of why the gay rights movement has advanced to where it is today. the climate of the era. the court is really in front including brown v. board, which was social change.

it was -- on behalf of the united states in that case said essentially we were fighting a war against racism and in that war until the very end our troops were rigidly segregated by race. a huge embarrassment and now the soviet union is pointing to the united states, this apartheid racist society. it's an embarrassment. it's time for segregation of the racism in schools to end. that was the poss that the government was taken. made it easier for the justices, and yet it took them 13 years from brown v. board until loving v. virginia to declare it unconstitutional. they had lots of opportunities bethey waited until the climate of the era had largely changed.

so the court can be important in reinforcing social change and it can hold it back as well. but it doesn't initiate change. justice liu: do you think that's in some tension with the conventional understanding of the court as a countermajoritarian institution, that the role of the court is supposed to be countermajoritarian? and yet some people would argue saying it's unrealistic for the court to be at the forefront even when individual rights are at stake. justice ginsburg: it should be countermajoritarian. when the bill of rights says these are the rules that congress has to abide by so the court should be vigorous in

enforcing the rights in the bill of rights and in the 14th amendment. the court is the guardian. the constitution makes the court the guardian of those rights. so, yes, the court must be vigilant but we can't do what, say, a political party can do. here's our platform, this year we're going to try to get through this and that. we have to wait until -- it has to start with the people. if it doesn't start with the people it's not going to get to the court. so you have to have a concerned citizenry to help these rights. justice liu: let me take us out of the law for a second and ask you, as our time runs out here who are your most important

mentors in your life? justice ginsburg: who -- what women were my role models i say in my growing up years, one was real and one was fictional. the real one was amelia earhart and the fictional one was nancy drew. [applause] [laughter] justice ginsburg: but amelia -- in my college years, certainly law school, never had a woman teacher. people asked me, did you always want to be a supreme court justice? i wanted to get a job in the law. that was my goal. women weren't on the bench in numbers on the federal bench until jimmy carter became president. he deserves tremendous credit for that. he was in office only four

years. he took a look at the federal judiciary and said, you know they all kind of look like me, but he was determined to appoint members of minority groups and women in numbers, not as one at a time curiosities. at least 25 women to federal district courts and i was one of the lucky 11 appointed to a court of appeals during his time. if he said in october of 1980 when he had a reception for the women he had appointed to the federal bench, even though he had no supreme court vacancy to fill he hoped he would be remembered for how he changed the complexion of the u.s. judiciary. and no president went back to old ways. president reagan determined to put the first woman on the supreme court.

justice liu: as you reflect on the entirety of your life and career, what do you think -- what aspects or events have given you the greatest personal satisfaction? justice ginsburg: i was tremendously fortunate to be born when i was, to be a lawyer with the skill in the 1970's to help move that progress and society along. if i had been born even 10 years earlier it would have been impossible. in the turning point brief we put on a cover of that brief the names of two women, paul even mary was one and -- what's the one i already mentioned?

the one who was concerned with putting women on juries. all over the country. we put their names on the briefs to say they kept the message alive even when people were not prepared to listen. and we owe them a tremendous debt. how lucky we are. just think of the quote, the first case, it comes out unanimous judgment and most of the others came out the right way in the 1970's. so i count myself enormously fortunate to be around when it was possible. to move society to the place where it should be, for the betterment of all of us. everyone is a beneficiary of ending gender discrimination.

women, men, like charles morris. children. justice rehnquist, this is a story of a man whose life died in childbirth. he was left the sole caretaker of the child, wanted social security benefits that would help him be able to work only part time while his child was young. those benefits were for mothers, not fathers. so the court decided that case i think it was in 1975. it was a unanimous judgment. one, discrimination against the women as wage earner. her social security taxes don't get for her family the same protection.

and then a few of them thought it was really discrimination against the male as parent. he would not have the opportunity to render personal care to his child. and then rehnquist all along said totally arbitrary from the point of view of the baby. why should the baby have the chance to be cared for by a parent, only if the parent is female and not male? but it's that realization that we will all be better off if we end the discrimination, if we end the era of women for the home and children and men are for the outside world. both should be in both worlds. [applause] justice liu: well - [applause] justice liu: before we go, let me say on behalf of everyone here i think we are all enormously fortunate that you've

lived the life that you have and been such a tremendous inspiration to so many generations and we look forward to what's still to come. thank you so much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]