being practical, in knowing that women weren't really wanted by the law. but when i gotarried, that settled that problem because then the attitude was, well, "if ruth wants to be a lawyer, that's okay. if she fails, she will have a husband to support her." [ laughter ] >> but your father-in-law was very supportive when you... i should just interject here that marty ginsburg, your husband, was a year ahead of you, and when you graduated, he was drafted, and you went to fort sill, oklahoma for two years. and if we have time, i'll ask you a few questions about that, but by the time you both returned to harvard laschool -- he a year ahead of you and you were starting -- you had an 18-month-old. >> 14 months. >> 14-month-old daughter. god forbid. i made a mistake. [ laughter ] and you were worried about

whether you could do it all, and your father-in-law, marty's father, was actually... you could tell the story better than i could. >> tremendously supportive always. he said, "ruth, if you don't want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one will think the less of you. but if you really want to go to law school and become a lawyer, well, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and you will find a way." that advice has stood me in good stead my entire life. the question is do i want this enough. if the answer is yes, i find a way. [ spectators murmur ] >> when you think about your life as a new yorker up until the time you went to washington, are there particular artists or political leaders

or activists that influenced your thinking or who you are over the course of time? >> well... the writers -- i think every girl of my age read and loved "a tree grows in brooklyn." >> mm-hmm. >> then there was that kind of risqué, nasty-boy book, j.d. salinger's "catcher in the rye." [ laughter ] and another person that i found inspiring was eleanor roosevelt, who wrote a column in the brooklyn eagle, "my day." it was syndicated, and it appeared regularly in the brooklyn eagle. an artist who inspired me -- i mentioned dean dixon. i'm just reading his biography now. it's a conductor -- another conductor has finally written

it. it deserves -- he deserves a biography. but he was a person who certainly changed my life, introducing me to such wonderful music. >> and what about artists? mean your taste in artwork is... i don't know that i would call it avant-garde but... >> compared to what? compared to what my colleagues have on their walls? >> yes, compared to what your colleagues have on their walls, for sure. [ laughter ] for sure. i mean, the justices of the supreme court are allowed to pick artwork from the smithsonian that's not in the main exhibit halls and to hang it on their walls. >> two from the national gallery and five from the museum of american art, which is a smithsonian museum. >> so, what's on your walls? >> so, i have two early rothko's from the

national gallery. and then i have five from the museum of american art, including two josef albers. the museum of american art has something called the frost collection. these are painters in the unit states in the depression, running from roughly 1931, '32 to 1945. >> so, you've told us what your first opera was and how you got introduced into opera. now, would you describe how you introduced your daughter jane to opera and what happened? >> in the wrong way at first. she was 4 years old. [ laughter ] i took her to the amato opera. it was an amateur opera company in manhattan. it was an abbreviated version of "trovatore."

when the soprano began singing, this small child stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs because that's what the soprano sounded like to her. [ laughter ] so i ushered her out of there quickly and decided it was a little premature. [ laughter ] so we waited until she was 8, and we chose "cosi fan tutte" at the met. it was an english translation. >> oh, good. [ laughs ] >> and we played the recordings for months before the great evening. i sat down with the libretto with her, and by the time she came to the performance, she knew most of the words. we sat in the first row of the family circle so she wouldn't have any heads to look over. we got her a velvet jumper, patent-leather shoes,

and it worked. [ laughter ] >> there is a new movie called "on the basis of sex," and it's about your first gender-discrimination case. and when i was at the screening, watching you, in the course of this movie, get turned down by one law firm after another, big, small, and medium in new york city, i couldn't help but wonder what ur career would have been like if just one of those law firms had actually hired you. >> i know what it would have been like. it's as justice sandra day o'connor said. she was a few years ahead of me in law school. she was very high in her class at stanford. no one would offer her a job as a lawyer. so she volunteered her services free to a county attorney

and said, "i'll work for you for four months. if, at the end of that period, you think i'm worth it, you can put me on the payroll." that's how she got her first job in the law. but she said, "ruth, you know, if we had gone to a large law firm, you know where we would be today? today we would be retired partners." [ laughter ] "and because that opportunity wasn't open to us, look where we ended up." [ laughter, applause ] >> so, let's talk for a few minutes about your early professional life. i think most people probably don't kn that you learned swedish so you could be the research assistant for who? and why? >> it was the columbia law school project on international

procedure. part of that project was to do studies of european legal systems. so there was one book about the italian legal system, another the french. and those were well underway when they decided to do sweden because sweden had adopted a new code of procedure in which they tried to incorporate what they saw as the best of the anglo-american system. so it had been in operation long enough to see how it was working out. so i spent a lot of time in sweden in '62 and '63 on that adventure. >> and you had to learn swedish. >> yes, well, i can read old swedish. i can read the swedish law codes [laughs] better than a

modern novel. >> [ laughs ] so, you were first in your class at harvard law school. >> no, i was not. >> well, you never graduated from harvard law school, but when you left, you were first in your class. >> i would say i was about fifth or sixth at harvard. >> and you were on the law review and then tied, i guess, for first in your class when you graduated from columbia. and if you all will go see "on the basis of sex," you will learn all about all of this. and you were recommended for a supreme court clerkship, i thk, with justice frankfurter, who didn't even give you an interview. you finally did get a clerkship with the help of one of your professors, jerry gunther, with a... well, you tell us the story. it's a fascinating tale.

>> professor gunther was in charge of getting clerkships for columbia law students. and he vowed he would find a place for me. i think he called every judge in the southern district of new york and the eastern district of new york, all of the second circuit judges, and there were no bidders. so he called back one of them who was a columbia college and law school graduate, judge edmund l. palmieri. and palmieri said, "her record is fine, but she has a 4-year-old daughter, and sometimes we have to work on saturday, even on a sunday." so gunther's response was, "give her a chance. and if she doesn't work out, there's a young man in her class who is going to a downtown firm, and he will jump in and take over."

so that was the carrot. there was also a stick, and the stick was, "and if you don't give her a chance, i will never recommend another columbia law student to you." >> it worked out. >> it worked out very well. [ laughter ] for women of my generation, getting the first job was the big hurdle. the woman who got the first job generally did at least as well as the men, so the second job was not the same hurdle. >> mm. there's another story that you tell, one of my favorites, about the pressures placed on women in the workplace then -- as now, to some extent -- and it involves your sometimes-errant son james, whose daughter mimi is at nyu now. >> and is in this audience.

>> and is in the audience tonight. but james was not the most behaviorally perfect child. let's put it that way. [ laughter ] >> that's a euphemism. i called him lively. his teachers called him hyperactive. >> [ laughs ] so, you used to get calls frequently. >> yes. at least once a month -- "come down to the school and let us tell you about your son's latest escapade." [ laughter ] well, one day, i was in my office at columbia and feeling particularly weary because i'd been up all night writing a brief. i said, "this child has two parents. please alternate calls." [ laughter, applause ]

"and it's his father's turn." so marty was called. he went down to the school. "what did james do?" "your son stole the elevator." it was one of these handheld elevators and the operator had gone out for a smoke, and james was dared by one of his classmates to take the kindergarten class up to the top floor. [ laughter ] got to the top floor and was greeted by three stone faces. so when marty was confronted with this, "your son stole the elevator," his response was, "how far could he take it?" [ laughter ] so i don't know if it was marty's sense of humor or the reluctance of the school to take a man away from his work -- there was no quick change in my son's behavior, but i got called barely once a semester.

[ laughter ] >> people who know you well see you as a special kind of feminist -- a little shy and retiring on the one hand and unyielding on the other. and i would note here for the record that, although you were a star professor at rutgers, you joined an equal-pay lawsuit against the school while you were there. and when you were a professor at columbia, you joined another sex-discrimination class action, not to mention the fact that you weighed in when t university tried to lay off 25 maids in order to save money but not one janitor. so my question is how did you take on all of these employers without totally alienating them? >> at rutgers, there was a very kindly dean.

i was engaged in 1963, the very year the equal pay act passed. but the message hadn't gotten home. so this kindly dean said, "you will have to take a substantial cut in salary." i said, "i expect that. rutgers is a state university." but when he told me how much, i asked, "well, what do you pay so and so," a man who had been out of law school about the same amount of time. he said, "ruth, he has a wife and two children to support and your husband has a good-paying job in new york." that's the way it was. well, the women at rutgers-newark brought an equal-pay claim. it settled finally in 1969, and the lowest raise that any woman got

was $6,000, which in those days... >> was a lot of money. >> yes. >> a very lot of money. >> then at columbia, with the maids/janitor controversy -- so, columbia laid off 25 maids -- many of them had been working there for years and years -- and not a single janitor. a feminist friend came to me and said, "you're brand new at columbia law school. this is what columbia did. what are you going to do about it?" so i went to the vice president in charge of business and told him that columbia was violating title vii. and he said, "dear, we have very good council, and would you like a cup of tea?" [ laughter ] >> ouf. >> with that, on the friday, there was a press conference. people who were there -- there was bella abzug, susan sontag. on monday was a hearing on the temporary restraining order.

the eeoc, the equal employment opportunities commission, sent out its chief counsel to argue it. the union switched sides. it finally dawned on them that they had a group that they had never organized, that they could organize -- the women. so columbia was startled. after all, they had signed a contract with the union and the union had insisted on separate seniority lines so that the janitors would come ahead of the maids. but the union then saw the light and said, "well, we couldn't possibly defend a contract that violates title vii." there was columbia all by itself. >> mm. [ chuckles ] >> i guess the hardest for my colleagues to take was the pension case.

and tiaa-cref, as l insurers did, had separate seniority lines. because on the average, women do live longer than men. but there are many women who die early and many men who live long, and the whole idea of this is you treat people as individuals, not lump them together -- "this is the way women are, this is the way men are." the prediction was that the n would flee from tiaa-cref if they had to combine the tables, the longevity tables. none of that happened. tiaa-cref is flourishing today. but that class action had a hundred named plaintiffs, women from all over the university, the precious few who had tenured positions and a group of administrators.

>> and you prevailed. >> yes. of course. [ laughter ] >> did they settle, or did it go to trial? >> there was a case that went to the supreme court. it was from california. and the supreme court said, "yeah, you have to treat the women the same as the men." and that that did it. and so all of the other cases settled. >> so... i'm going to take you back to your days at harvard law school, when... i will allude again to the movie. your... marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and he had a lot of surgeries and a lot of radiation, and he was pretty sick for, i guess, a year, something pretty close to a year. >> it started in december.

and he was finished with the -- at least there was -- there was a five year look-see operation, follow-up operation, but there was massive surgery. and then there was daily radiation because, in those days, there was no chemotherapy. that was a very trying time. >> so, would you describe what your typical day was like in that period of time? because i think it framed your penchant for working until 4:00 in the morning or later. >> well, i'd go to my classes in the morning. i had note takers for marty'classes. i would then go to mass general to see him. then i'd come home and play with jane and feed her

and put her to bed. marty would get -- well, first, the daily radiation made him very sick. so when he finished being sick and he finally went to sleep, he would wake up about midnight. and, at midnight, whatever food he was going to have for the day, he would have then, and he would dictate his third-year paper to me. so when he went back to sleep, then i went back to my own work to prepare for the next morning's classes. >> so that's how you got to think that 2:00 a.m. was an early-to-bed time. >> yes, it would he been. >> [ chuckles ] so, in the movie, there is -- this will really entice you --

fairly early on in the movie, there's a sex scene. i wonder what you thought of the sex scene. >> what i thought of it was that marty would have loved it. [ laughter, applause ] >> so, i'm looking at my watch because i'm a broadcaster. it says that we're just about, i think, out of time. you know, you had a lifelong friendship with the late justice scalia -- or at least lifelong from the time of, i guess, the early '80s or maybe even before that when you were at the university of chicago for one semester or something like that. but you were friends for a very long time, and it is no secret that you had very different interpretations of the constitution and how to interpret the constitution, and those differences are even

the basis of an opera. >> a comic opera. >> a comic opera. [ laughter ] a comic, not a tragic opera. a comic opera. so, people often say to me, "how could they have such good friends?" >> perhaps i can explain scalia's view, my view, and our togetherness by repeating some lines from the opera, "scalia/ginsburg." oh, people ask me, "why did you let scalia go first?" because everything, as you know, in the court is done by seniority and scalia was appointed in the late '80s. i didn't get there until the '90s. anyway, his opening aria is a rage aria, and it goes like this. "the justices are blind.

how can they possibly spout this? the constitution says absolutely nothing about this." and then in my lyric soprano voice i answer him, telling him he's searching for bright-line solutions to problems that don't have easy answers. but the great thing about our constitution is that, like our society, it can evolve. and then she goes into a jazz routine with, "let it grow, let it grow." [ laughter ] the plot of this opera is roughly based on "the magic flute," and justice scalia is locked in a dark room, being punished for excessive dissenting. [ laughter ] i enter the scene through a glass ceiling to help him get through the tests he has to pass to get out of the dark room.

so the person in charge of the show asks, "why do you want to help him? he's your enemy." i say, "he's not my enemy. he's my dear friend." and then we sing a duet, and it is, "we are different -- we are one," different in our approach to interpreting legal texts, but one in our reverence for the constitution and the institution we serve. >> so, with that, that seems like a good place to end. [ applause ] thank you, justice ginsburg. >> thank you. ♪ >> this program was made possible by viewers like you.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for sunday, september 20: tributes pour in for supre court justice ruth bader ginsburg as the president pushes to fill her seatefore election day. covid-19 deaths and a grim milestone for the u.s. and our special roads to election 2020: iowa and illinois. next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the anderson family fund. bernard and denise schwartz.