as well. >> i have. i knew justice scalia before he came on the court. he is a total crack up. i love the guy. he is such a good guy, so generous, so warmhearted, i love spending time with him. he did me a big favor. if you don't mind, i am going to tell the story. this goes back to your first question about the confirmation process. when you go through the confirmation process now, at least if you go through the way i go through it, there is the nominee of a democratic president and if you characterized by demographics, i think they would say that i am a jewish woman from new york city. i am not known to have particularly strong feelings about guns maybe. when i went to all of these courtesy visits, the question i was asked most was not about

abortion or religion or anything else. the question i get asked most was my views on guns. nobody can really say, how are you going to rule in this case, how are you going to rule in that case. instead they would ask me questions that were designed to figure out who i was and what i was. a lot of people, democrats, republicans, both, they would sit me down in the chair and say, did you ever hunt? i would say to myself, that is not really what we did growing up in york city. [laughter] they would say, did you have friends who hunt? have you ever shot a gun? have you ever held a gun? all of my answers to these questions were in their view, pathetic. [laughter] i was talking to one of the senators from idaho and he goes through these questions.

he says to me, this is really important to me. it is important to my constituents. it is important that you understand how important the gun culture is in my state. there is a lot of fear about the way you might think about second amendment issues. you may not be familiar with this set of things. i appreciated that. i said to him, senator, i tell you, i am the person i am. i have had the experiences that i have had. if you want to invite me hunting, i would be delighted to go. this look of abject horror came over his face. [laughter] do i have to go hunting with her? [laughter] i realize maybe i had crossed a little bit of a line. i said, i will tell you what senator, if i am lucky enough to be confirmed, i will ask justice scalia, who i need to be a great

hunter, to take me hunting. when i was confirmed, i went to justice scalia and i told him this whole story. he thought it was hilarious. he said, we are on it. the first thing he did is that he took me to the gun club. we shot clay pigeons and he gave me lessons about gun safety. then he started taking me out -- we've done this multiple times. probably five or six times and we are going in a few weeks. at the end of, i guess it was the end of 2 years ago. the end of my first term on the court, he said to me, you have the birds down. we are going after big game. we went up to wyoming together. we spent three days in wyoming

and each of us had a deer license. each of us shot a deer. neither of us on antelope. he think that was a failure of the trip. he thought that we could've have shot the deers in his backyard. [laughter] i enjoyed it and i shot a deer. i have a great printable justice scalia that i value highly. if i tell you that i go to the opera with justice ginsburg, you would probably not be as interested in that. but i do that too. >> let me follow up a little bit on maybe what is a more process oriented version of a similar question. i found that it is wonderful to be a justice on the supreme court terms of personal relationships. it is obviously a group of folks

that to hera those stories and it is very curdling. but you do disagree with each other. you do disagree vehemently at times. when is it appropriate to write a dissent? after you've lost once, that they justice have an obligation to admit defeat and go on? how does that work in your mind? >> i think dissenting opinions play an important role in the court. that is not to say that i do not value consensus. to the extent that we can achieve consensus, i think we should try hard to do so. i very much admire the chief justice's efforts in that regard. i hope that i am a willing participant in that effort. i think the absolute worst thing

on the court is when the splinter and when there is not even a majority. when there is one of these four people say one thing, three people say one thing, two people say another thing. that is the worst thing. these poor lower court judges do not know what to make of what we have said. obviously, lawyers as well. that is the thing that i think is most important. that we try to come together at least to get a clear majority. sometimes that is not possible. i think a lot of effort should be expended on that. once you're beyond that, -- there is a majority. are you going to dissent from it? if the majority can practice ruling narrowly enough, so that a big division or disagreement are not implicated, that is a tricky thing.

we should try to do that. sometimes it is not going to be possible. there are some issues that you can narrow all you want. we are still going to disagree. and then a dissent is appropriate. there are different kinds of dissents. some are a matter of conviction, i have to be right am. there are cases we do that are not so important. there will nevertheless be a dissent. you say, what is the deal there? in a case about the meaning of a particular statute. it is just an honest disagreement about what these words on the page mean and whether maybe it is a disagreement that is based on ideological differences about statutory interpretation.

maybe it is just different based on how you read it -- a certain provision which are often very complicated. you will see a dissent think what is the purpose of that dissent? and that case, it is not your writing for the ages. you are not writing in the hopes that the court will change his mind or anything like that. you are writing that it is a complicated thing and both sides presented arguments. both sides of work very hard on that. the fact that different people can look at the same words and read in two different ways. in some respects, that is an honest thing to say. this is not a 9-0 case. it is not a slamdunk. the lawyers that were presenting on the other side were not making fallacious arguments. they may have had a point. you can honestly express what the entire court things about a case.

sometimes there is also a dissent, and it is not a dissent that you take with you to the grave. oh, i said these words meant x and i am sticking with that for all time. there are other cases which are more matters of strong conviction where you really hope that what the dissent will be is a kind of marker. it is a marker that says, i disagree with this and i think it is important that the court go no further down this very wrong road. and potentially, where you say, i disagree with this and it will be a good day if the court changes its mind. there have been extremely important dissents in american legal history. they have become majority opinion.

the most obvious example is that our entire first amendment tradition started out as a dissent of oliver wendell holmes and louis brandeis over what the first amendment is all about. not every dissent will be like that. maybe one design your entire life will be like that. if you are lucky. i think there are dissents were you are saying, this is the wrong road. they're going to be other cases that will involve other issues. i'm telling you why this is the wrong approach to this entire line of cases. in terms of -- precedent is very important of course. usually, you need a lot more precedent to overrule a case. if you could overrule a case