Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Unlikely Path to the Supreme Court
Before she became a hero to feminists, she had to overcome their distrust.
露絲·巴德·金斯伯格通往最高法院的艱辛之路：在成為女權主義者的英雄之前，她需要先消除她們的不信任
來源：《紐約客》2018年10月1日
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-unlikely-path-to-the-supreme-court
By Jill Lepore
譯者：覃天
October 1, 2018
The celebrity of Justice Ginsburg, photographed in 1993, obscures the controversy that jeopardized her Supreme Court nomination.Photograph by Irving Penn / © Condé Nast
Ruth Bader Ginsburg blinked behind giant, round eyeglasses. It was the first day of her confirmation hearings, in July of 1993, the year after the Year of the Woman, and Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was very pleased to see her. Keen to do penance for the debacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings, just two years before—the year before the Year of the Woman—when an all-male committee, chaired by Biden, failed to credit what Anita Hill had to say about George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, he could hardly have been friendlier to Bill Clinton’s nominee, a much respected and widely admired sixty-year-old appellate judge. She sat with the stillness of a watchful bird. 「Judge Ginsburg, welcome,」 Biden said, heartily. 「And, believe me, you are welcome here this morning.」
魯斯·巴德·金斯伯格(Ruth Bader Ginsburg)戴著一副巨大的圓形眼鏡，眨著眼睛。那是1993年7月，即婦女年之後的一年，對她的確認聽證會的第一天，參議院司法委員會主席喬·拜登見到她非常高興。就在兩年前，也就是女性年的前一年，一個由拜登擔任主席的全是男性的委員會沒能相信安妮塔·希爾（Anita Hill）對喬治·W·布希所說的話。作為布希的最高法院提名人，他對比爾•柯林頓的提名人——一位廣受尊敬、廣受尊敬的60歲上訴法官——幾乎沒有比他更友好的了。她安靜地坐著，像一隻警惕的小鳥。「歡迎金斯伯格法官，」拜登熱情地說。「相信我，今天早上你在這裡是受歡迎的。」
He had more reasons, too, to beam at Ginsburg. Only weeks earlier, Clinton had withdrawn his nomination of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General, an abandonment that had followed the very new President’s unsuccessful nominations of two female Attorneys General, Kimba Wood and Zoë Baird. Clinton and Biden needed a successful, high-profile female appointment, one without a discussion of pubic hair or video porn or nannies. On the way to work on the first day of the Ginsburg hearings, Biden had read the New York Times on the train and found that there was no mention of Ginsburg on page 1, or page 2, or page 3, which, he told Ginsburg, 「was the most wonderful thing that has happened to me since I have been chairman of this committee.」 He flashed his movie-star grin.
他也有更多的理由對金斯伯格微笑。就在幾周前，柯林頓撤回了對拉尼·吉尼耶(Lani Guinier)擔任助理司法部長的提名，這是在新總統提名兩名女性司法部長金巴·伍德(Kimba Wood)和佐埃·貝爾德(ZoëBaird)未獲成功後放棄的。柯林頓和拜登需要一個不討論陰毛、色情視頻或保姆的人，一個成功的、高調的女性任命人選，在金斯伯格聽證會第一天去工作的路上，拜登在火車上看了《紐約時報》的報導，發現在第一頁、第二頁或第三頁上都沒有提到金斯伯格，他告訴金斯伯格，「這是自我擔任該委員會主席以來發生在我身上的最美妙的事情。」他露出電影明星的笑容。
During that first session, scheduled for two and a half hours, the committee members—sixteen men and two lately added women—did nearly all the talking, delivering opening statements. Not until the outset of the second session did Biden sidle up to a question. 「The Constitution has to be read by justices in light of its broadest and most fundamental commitments, commitments to liberty, commitments to individual dignity, equality of opportunity,」 he said, putting on his glasses, and taking them off again. Ginsburg blinked and stared and waited.
在計劃了兩個半小時的第一次會議期間，委員會成員——16名男性和兩名最近增加的女性幾乎完成了所有的發言，發表了開幕詞。直到第二次會議開始，拜登才悄悄地回答了一個問題。「大法官們必須根據憲法最廣泛、最基本的承諾、對自由的承諾、對個人尊嚴和機會平等的承諾來閱讀憲法，」他說著，戴上眼鏡，又摘下眼鏡。金斯伯格眨了眨眼睛，凝視並等待著。
Biden’s question concerned a recent speech, the Madison Lecture, in which Ginsburg had said that in making decisions concerning rights not listed in the Constitution judges should be 「moderate and restrained」 and avoid stepping 「boldly in front of the political process,」 as he reminded her. 「But, Judge,」 Biden said, 「in your work as an advocate in the seventies you spoke with a different voice. In the seventies, you pressed for immediate extension of the fullest constitutional protection for women under the Fourteenth Amendment, and you said the Court should grant such protection notwithstanding what the rest of society, including the legislative branch, thought about the matter. . . . Can you square those for me or point out their consistency to me?」
拜登的問題涉及最近的一次演講——麥迪遜演講。金斯伯格在演講中表示，在對憲法未列出的權利做出裁決時，法官應該「溫和和克制」，避免「大膽地站在政治進程面前」，他提醒金斯伯格。「但是，法官，」拜登說，「在你七十年代作為一名倡導者的工作中，你用不同的聲音說話。在七十年代，你敦促立即延長憲法對婦女最全面的保護，根據第十四條修正案，你說法院應該給予這種保護，而不考慮社會上其他人，包括立法部門對此事的看法.你能為我解釋一下，或者給我指出它們的一致性好嗎？「
What Biden was getting at has been mostly lost in the years since, years during which Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a distinguished Justice, has become a pop-culture feminist icon, a comic-book superhero. In the past year alone, the woman known to her fans as the Notorious R.B.G. has been the subject of a 「Saturday Night Live」 skit; a fawning documentary; an upcoming bio-pic, 「On the Basis of Sex」 (from a screenplay written by Ginsburg’s nephew); a CNN podcast, 「RBG Beyond Notorious」; and a new biography, 「Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life」 (Knopf), by Jane Sherron De Hart, an emeritus history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
在那之後的幾年裡，拜登想要的東西已經基本消失了。在這段時間裡，傑出的大法官露絲·巴德·金斯伯格已經成為流行文化中的女權主義偶像，一個漫畫書中的超級英雄。僅在過去的一年裡，這位被粉絲稱為「臭名昭著的R.B.G.」的女人就成了《周六夜現場》小品、紀錄片、即將上映的傳記電影《性別為本》(由金斯伯格的侄子寫的劇本)、CNN播客《臭名昭著之外的RBG》以及榮休的簡·謝倫·德哈特（Jane Sherron De Hart）的新傳記《露絲·巴德·金斯伯格：一生》的主角。
Such lavish biographical attention to a living Supreme Court Justice is unusual, and, new, even if that change is easy to lose sight of amid the recent intense scrutiny of the high-school and college years of the Trump nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) Unlike candidates for political office, most sitting Justices have preferred to remain, if not anonymous, largely unknown. The position is unelected, the appointment is for life, and the Justices are not supposed to place themselves in the public eye, for fear of making themselves beholden to public opinion: arguably, the less attention to their personal lives the better. Before the past, tumultuous decade, few, if any, Justices who hadn’t previously held an elected office had been the subject of a full-dress biography while still serving on the Court.
對在世的最高法院大法官給予如此奢侈的傳記關注是非同尋常的，而且是新的，儘管在最近對川普提名人布雷特·卡瓦諾(Brett Kavanaugh)的高中和大學生活進行了密切關注的情況下，這種關注很容易被忽視。卡瓦諾被指控性侵。(他否認了這些指控。)與政治職位候選人不同，大多數現任大法官即使不是匿名的，也更願意保持默默無聞。這個職位是非選舉產生的，任命是終身的，大法官們不應該把自己放在公眾的視線中，因為他們害怕讓自己受制於公眾輿論：可以說，對自己的私生活關注越少越好。在過去動蕩的十年之前，沒有民選職位的大法官在還在最高法院任職時，很少有人會成為一本傳記的主題。
Writing a biography of a sitting Justice introduces all kinds of problems of perspective, authority, and obligation. Ginsburg has not yet deposited her papers in any archive and, having refused calls to resign under Obama’s watch, says that she has no plans to retire. De Hart, who began the project fifteen years ago, relied on published material, public records, and, extensively, interviews. Her publisher describes the book as 「written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.」 It would have been impossible to write the book without that coöperation, but it comes at no small cost.
寫一本在任大法官的傳記會帶來各種視角、權威和義務方面的問題。金斯伯格還沒有將她的文件存入任何檔案館，在拒絕了歐巴馬領導下要求她辭職的呼聲後，她說她沒有退休的計劃。德哈特在15年前開始了這個項目，他依賴於出版的材料、公共記錄和廣泛的採訪。她的出版商形容這本書是「在露絲·巴德·金斯伯格的合作下寫成的。」如果沒有這樣的合作，寫這本書是不可能的，但它付出了不小的代價。
Making De Hart’s problems worse is Ginsburg’s unprecedented judicial celebrity. On Matt Groening’s animated series 「Futurama,」 Ginsburg appeared as an artificially preserved head, and although Antonin Scalia’s severed head made a cameo or two as well, it was the Ginsburg character’s catchphrase—「You Ruth Bader believe it!」—that ended up on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and is the thing your teen-ager says to you at the dinner table. This winter, Ginsburg, eighty-five, did her daily workout with Stephen Colbert on 「The Late Show.」 「I’m a huge fan!」 Colbert said. Thurgood Marshall never lifted weights with Johnny Carson. This summer, three goats were brought to Montpelier to eat the poison ivy spreading throughout the Vermont state capital: they are named Ruth, Bader, and Ginsburg. To my knowledge, no flock of sheep were ever named Oliver, Wendell, and Holmes.
讓德哈特的問題雪上加霜的是金斯伯格史無前例的司法名譽。在馬特·格羅寧(Matt Groning)的動畫片《飛出個未來》(Futurama)中，金斯伯格以人工保存的頭部的形象出現，儘管安東寧·斯卡利亞(Antonin Scalia)被砍下的頭部也出演了一兩個客串，但最終出現在T恤和咖啡杯上的是金斯伯格這個角色的口號：「你，露絲·巴德相信它！」，這也是你的青少年在餐桌上對你說的話。今年冬天，85歲的金斯伯格在《深夜秀》(The Late Show)節目中與史蒂芬·科爾伯特(Stephen Colbert)一起每天鍛鍊身體。「我是你的鐵桿粉絲！」科爾伯特說。瑟古德·馬歇爾從未和約翰尼·卡森一起舉重。今年夏天，三隻山羊被帶到蒙彼利埃吃遍布佛蒙特州首府的毒藤：它們的名字是露絲、巴德和金斯伯格。據我所知，沒有一群羊叫奧利弗、溫德爾和福爾摩斯。
God bless Ruth Bader Ginsburg, goats, bobbleheads, and all. But trivialization—R.B.G.’s workout tips! her favorite lace collars!—is not tribute. Female heroes are in short supply not because women aren’t brave but because female bravery is demeaned, no kind more than intellectual courage. Isn’t she cute? Ginsburg was and remains a scholar, an advocate, and a judge of formidable sophistication, complexity, and, not least, contradiction and limitation. It is no kindness to flatten her into a paper doll and sell her as partisan merch.
上帝保佑露絲·巴德·金斯伯格、保佑山羊、波波頭和所有人。但是有些平凡化了她的形象——R.B.G.的鍛鍊秘訣！她最喜歡的蕾絲領子！-這並非是對她的致敬。女英雄供不應求，不是因為女性不勇敢，而是因為女性的勇敢被貶低了，沒有什麼比智慧的勇氣更可愛的了。她不可愛嗎？金斯伯格過去是，現在仍然是一位學者、倡導者和評判者，對令人敬畏的老練、複雜，尤其是矛盾和局限性的判斷。不論是把她壓成一個紙娃娃，還是隨後把她當作黨派的商品來出售，這都不是善意的行為。
Doing so also obscures a certain irony. Ginsburg often waxes nostalgic about her confirmation hearings, as she did this September, when, regretting the partisan furor over Brett Kavanaugh—even before Christine Blasey Ford came forward—she said, 「The way it was was right; the way it is is wrong.」 The second of those statements is undeniably and painfully true, but the first flattens the past. What Biden was getting at, in 1993, was what the President himself had said, dismissing the idea of nominating Ginsburg when it was first suggested to him. 「The women,」 Clinton said, 「are against her.」
這樣做也掩蓋了一定的諷刺意味。金斯伯格經常懷念她的提名確認聽證會，就像她在今年9月所做的那樣，當時她後悔布雷特·卡瓦諾(Brett Kavanaugh)引發的黨派憤怒——甚至在克裡斯汀·布萊西·福特(Christine Blasey Ford)站出來之前——她說，「當時的方式是正確的，現在的方式是錯誤的。」不可否認，第二種說法是正確的，令人痛苦，但第一種說法抹平了過去。拜登的意思是，1993年，當金斯伯格第一次被推薦給他時，拜登自己說過，拒絕了提名金斯伯格的想法。柯林頓說：「婦女們反對她。」
Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933. At thirteen, she wrote a newspaper editorial, a tribute to the Charter of the United Nations. Her mother, an admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, died when she was seventeen. Bader went to Cornell, where she liked to say that she learned how to write from Vladimir Nabokov. At Cornell, she also met Martin Ginsburg, and fell in love. They married in 1954 and had a baby, Jane, in 1955. Brilliant and fiercely independent, Ginsburg was devoted to Marty, to Jane, and to the law. At Harvard Law School, which first admitted women in 1950, she was one of only nine women in a class of some five hundred. In one of the first scenes in 「On the Basis of Sex,」 Erwin Griswold, the dean of the law school, asks each of those nine women, during a dinner party at his house, why she is occupying a place that could have gone to a man. In the film, Ginsburg, played by Felicity Jones, gives the dean an answer to which he can have no objection: 「My husband, Marty, is in the second-year class. I’m at Harvard to learn about his work. So that I might be a more patient and understanding wife.」 This, which is more or less what Ginsburg actually said, was a necessary lie. It was possible for a woman to attend law school—barely—but it was not possible for her to admit her ambition.
露絲·巴德1933年出生於布魯克林。13歲時，她在報紙上寫了一篇社論，向《聯合國憲章》致敬。她的母親在她17歲時去世，她是埃莉諾·羅斯福(Eleanor Roosevelt)的崇拜者。巴德去了康奈爾大學，她很樂於說，她從弗拉基米爾·納博科夫（Vladimir Nabokov）那裡學到了寫作。在康奈爾大學，她還遇到了馬丁·金斯伯格（Martin Ginsburg），並墜入愛河。他們於1954年結婚，並於1955年生下了一個孩子，取名為簡（Jane）。金斯伯格才華橫溢，極其獨立，他忠於馬蒂、簡和法律。在1950年首次招收女性的哈佛法學院(Harvard Law School)，她是這個500多人的班級中僅有的9名女性之一。法學院院長歐文·格裡斯沃爾德(Erwin Griswold)在他家的一次晚宴上問這九名女性，為什麼她佔據了一個本可以屬於男性的位置，這是《性別為本》(On Basis Of Sex)中的第一個場景。在影片中，菲麗希緹·瓊斯（Felicity Jones）飾演的金斯伯格給了院長一個他不會反對的答案：「我的丈夫馬蒂是二年級的學生。我來哈佛是為了了解他的工作。這樣我才能成為一個更有耐心、更善解人意的妻子。「這或多或少是金斯伯格說的，這是一個必要的謊言。女性可以勉強上法學院，但她不可能承認自己的抱負。
In 1957, Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During his illness and treatment—surgery followed by radiation—Ruth not only cared for him, and for the baby, but also covered all of his classes and helped him with his papers. She kept up an almost inhuman schedule, often working through the night. After Marty graduated, he took a job in New York, and Ruth transferred to Columbia. She graduated first in her class. 「That’s my mommy,」 four-year-old Jane said, when Ginsburg crossed the stage to accept her diploma.
1957年，馬丁被診斷出患有睪丸癌。在他生病和治療期間，手術後進行放射治療時，露絲不僅照顧他和孩子，還上完了他所有的課程，並幫助他完成論文。她的日程安排近乎沒有人性，經常通宵工作。馬丁畢業後，在紐約找了一份工作，露絲轉到了哥倫比亞。她以全班第一名的成績畢業。當金斯伯格走上舞臺接受畢業證書時，四歲的簡說：「那是我媽媽。」
Looking for work, Ginsburg confronted the limits of the profession’s willingness to take female lawyers seriously. Felix Frankfurter, the first Supreme Court Justice to hire an African-American clerk, in 1948, refused to hire a woman, even after he was reassured that Ginsburg never wore pants. Stymied, Ginsburg went to Sweden to undertake a comparative study of Swedish and American law. On her return, in 1963, she accepted a position at Rutgers, teaching civil procedure. A year and a half later, when she found herself pregnant—given her husband’s medical history, this blessing was unexpected—Ginsburg delayed informing the university, for fear of losing her position.
在找工作時，金斯伯格面臨著該行業不願認真對待女律師的限制。菲利克斯·法蘭克福(Felix Frankfurter)是1948年第一位聘用非裔美國人書記員的最高法院法官，他拒絕僱傭女性，即使他確信金斯伯格從來不穿褲子。由於受阻，金斯伯格前往瑞典，對瑞典和美國的法律進行了比較研究。1963年回國後，她接受了羅格斯大學的一份工作，教授民事訴訟程序。一年半後，當她發現自己懷孕了——考慮到她丈夫的病史，這個祝福是意想不到的——金斯伯格推遲去通知大學，因為她擔心失去自己的職位。
Ginsburg, in other words, had plenty of experience of what would now be called—because she called it this—discrimination on the basis of sex. In 1969, Ginsburg was promoted to full professor and her son, James, entered nursery school, rites of passage that freed her to explore a new interest: she began volunteering for the A.C.L.U. Working with and eventually heading the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project, Ginsburg pursued a series of cases designed to convince the Supreme Court, first, that there is such a thing as sex discrimination and, second, that it violates the Constitution.
換句話說，金斯伯格對現在所說的基於性別的歧視有著豐富的經驗，因為她稱之為性別歧視。1969年，金斯伯格被提升為全職教授，她的兒子詹姆斯進入託兒所，這讓她得以自由地探索新的興趣：她開始為美國公民自由聯盟(ACLU)做志願者。金斯伯格與美國公民自由聯盟(ACLU)的婦女權利項目合作，並最終領導了該項目。金斯伯格提起了一系列案件，旨在說服最高法院，首先，性別歧視是存在的，其次，它違反了憲法。
Influenced by the pioneering constitutional analysis of Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon, Ginsburg borrowed, too, from the strategy of Thurgood Marshall, who, as head of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal and Educational Defense Fund beginning in 1940, had pursued his agenda step by step, case by case, over fourteen years, all the way to Brown v. Board, decided in 1954. Erwin Griswold, notwithstanding his resentment of women law students, eventually dubbed Ginsburg 「the Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law.」
受保利·默裡(Pauli Murray)和多蘿西·肯揚(Dorothy Kenyon)開創性的憲法分析的影響，金斯伯格還借鑑了瑟古德·馬歇爾(瑟古德·馬歇爾)的策略，馬歇爾從1940年開始擔任全國有色人種協進會（N.A.A.C.P）下的，法律和教育辯護基金(Legal And Education Defense Fund)的負責人，在長達14年的時間裡，一步步地推行自己的議程，直到1954年她審理的布朗訴託皮卡教育局案（Brown v. Board）。歐文·格裡斯沃爾德儘管對法律系的女學生不滿，但他最終還是稱金斯伯格為「性別平等法的瑟古德·馬歇爾」。
She prepared herself for litigation by teaching courses on women and the law, a subject that had rarely been taught. An undisputed leader of an emerging field, she soon left Rutgers. (「Columbia Snares a Prize in the Quest for Women Professors,」 the Times reported.) Unlike Marshall, who was very often on the front lines of civil unrest and political protest, Ginsburg worked full time as a law-school professor, which placed constraints on her time and kept her at some remove from protests taking place on the streets. And, as De Hart observes, several crucial features distinguish their strategies. Marshall relied on the equal-protection clause—「No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws」—of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted after the Civil War in order to stop the former Confederate states from denying former slaves equal rights. Ginsburg also invoked the equal-protection clause, but was left to argue only by analogy, suggesting that discrimination on the basis of sex is the same sort of thing. Finally, while there were plenty of rifts within the civil-rights movement, Marshall never had to battle African-Americans opposed to the very notion of equality under the law; Ginsburg, by contrast, faced a phalanx of conservative women, led by Phyllis Schlafly, who objected to equal rights altogether.
金斯伯格通過教授關於婦女和法律的課程為自己的訴訟做好了準備，這是一門很少有人教過的課程。作為新興領域無可爭議的領導者，她很快就離開了羅格斯大學。與經常站在內亂和政治抗議第一線的馬歇爾不同，金斯伯格是法學院的全職教授，這限制了她的時間，讓她遠離街頭發生的抗議活動。而且，正如德哈特所觀察到的那樣，有幾個關鍵特徵區分了他們的戰略。馬歇爾依據的是平等保護條款——「任何州都不得……」。否認其管轄範圍內的任何人受到法律的平等保護「——摘自第十四修正案，該修正案是在內戰後通過的，目的是阻止前邦聯各州剝奪前奴隸的平等權利。金斯伯格還援引了平等保護條款，但只有通過類比才能辯駁，這表明基於性別的歧視是一回事。最後，雖然民權運動內部存在許多分歧，但馬歇爾從未與反對法律規定的平等概念的非裔美國人作鬥爭；相比之下，金斯伯格面對的是以菲利斯·施拉夫利(Phyllis Schlafly)為首的一大群保守派女性，，她們完全反對平等權利。
In one of the earliest of Ginsburg’s anti-discrimination cases, Reed v. Reed (1971), she established that an Idaho law that gave preference to men over women in the administration of estates violated the equal-protection clause. Ginsburg called her victory in Reed 「a small, guarded step.」 She next hoped to bring to the Supreme Court a case called Struck v. Secretary of Defense. When Captain Susan Struck became pregnant, she decided to have the baby, but Air Force policy meant that she would lose her job unless she had an abortion. Ginsburg prepared to argue Struck’s case on equal-protection grounds: since no Air Force policy barred men from having children, the government was discriminating against Struck on the basis of sex. In choosing a case that would advance a desperately needed argument about reproductive autonomy, Ginsburg had cleverly selected one in which the litigant had chosen to have a baby, rather than to end a pregnancy, so that the Court’s attention would be focussed on the equality claims of women (and not on the politics of abortion). But the Air Force changed its policy and, in 1972, at the urging of then Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, the case was dismissed, a decision that had profound consequences: the following year, the Court ruled on Roe v. Wade instead, and struck down anti-abortion legislation not on the ground of equal protection but on the ground of a much weaker constitutional doctrine, the right to privacy.
在金斯伯格最早的反歧視案件之一——裡德訴裡德案(1971)中，她確立了愛達荷州一項在遺產管理中優先考慮男性而不是女性的法律違反了平等保護條款。金斯伯格稱她在這個案件中的勝利是「小心翼翼的一小步」。她下一步希望向最高法院提起一起名為斯特拉克訴國防部長（Struck v. Secretary of Defense）的案件。當機長蘇珊·斯特拉克發現自己懷孕時，她決定生下孩子，但空軍的政策是，除非她墮胎，否則她將失去工作。金斯伯格準備以平等保護的理由為斯特拉克辯護：由於空軍政策沒有禁止男性生育，政府是基於性別歧視斯特拉克。金斯伯格精明地選擇了一個案件，在這個案件中，當事人選擇了生孩子，而不是終止懷孕，這樣法院的注意力就會集中在婦女的平等要求上(而不是墮胎的政策上)。但空軍在1972年改變了政策。在時任總檢察長歐文·格裡斯沃德(Erwin Griswold)的敦促下，該案被駁回，這一決定產生了深遠的後果：次年，最高法院轉而就羅訴韋德案(Roe v.Wade)做出裁決，推翻了反墮胎立法，理由不是平等保護，而是一種軟弱得多的憲法原則——隱私權。
If Struck was Ginsburg’s next, carefully placed stepping stone across a wide river, Roe was a rickety wooden plank thrown down across the water and—Ginsburg thought—likely to rot. In a lecture she delivered in 1984, she noted the political significance of the fact that the Court had treated sex discrimination as a matter of equal protection but reproductive autonomy as a matter of privacy. When the Court overturned laws on the basis of sex discrimination, no great controversy ensued, she observed, but Roe v. Wade remained 「a storm center.」 She went on, 「Roe v. Wade sparked public opposition and academic criticism, in part, I believe, because the Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action.」
如果說斯特拉克是金斯伯格在一條寬闊的河流上小心放置的一塊墊腳石，那麼羅訴韋德案就是一塊被扔到水面上的，搖搖晃晃的木板，而且——金斯伯格認為——它很可能會腐爛。在1984年的一次演講中，她指出了法院將性別歧視視為平等保護問題而將生育自主權視為隱私問題這一事實的政治意義。她觀察到，當最高法院以性別歧視為基礎推翻法律時，並沒有發生太大的爭議，但羅韋德案仍然是「風暴的中心」。她接著說，「羅訴韋德案引發了公眾的反對和學術批評，我認為，部分原因是最高法院在它下令的改變上冒險過了頭，為自己的行動提供了一個不完整的理由。」
There are more what-ifs than there are stars in the sky. But Roe helped conservatives defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which had passed Congress and appeared well on its way to ratification until Schlafly warned, starting in 1974, that the 「E.R.A. means abortion.」 Following Ginsburg’s logic, it’s impossible not to wonder whether, if the Court had heard Struck instead of Roe, the E.R.A. would have passed, after which reproductive rights would have been recognized by the courts as a matter of equal protection. And the nation would not have become so divided. If, if.
假設比天空中的星星還多。但羅訴韋德案幫助保守派挫敗了平等權利修正案，該修正案已經在國會獲得通過，似乎正在順利獲得批准，直到施拉夫利（Schlafly）從1974年開始警告說，「平等權利修正案意味著墮胎」。按照金斯伯格的邏輯，人們不可能不懷疑，萬一最高法院聽證的是斯特拉克而不是羅，《選舉權法案》是否會獲得通過，之後法院就會承認生育權是平等保護的問題。這個國家就不會變得如此分裂。萬一，萬一。
Asked by the A.C.L.U. to take on litigation relating to the defense of Roe, Ginsburg declined. Instead, she continued to pursue anti-discrimination cases, and first appeared before the Supreme Court in Frontiero v. Richardson, in 1973, advocating for Sharron Frontiero, an Air Force lieutenant who had been denied benefits for her husband which were granted to men for their wives. 「I ask no favor for my sex,」 Ginsburg told the nine men on the bench, quoting the nineteenth-century women’s-rights advocate Sarah Grimké. 「All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.」 Ginsburg won, though the Court’s holding was narrow. As she proceeded to try to widen that holding, she continued teaching at Columbia and writing law-review articles. In 1979, after Jimmy Carter signed legislation expanding the federal judiciary, Ginsburg began pursuing a judgeship.
應美國公民自由聯盟的要求，金斯伯格拒絕了與羅的辯護有關的訴訟。相反，她繼續追查反歧視案件，1973年首次出現在最高法院的弗朗蒂羅訴理察森案（Frontiero v. Richardson）中，她為空軍中尉沙倫·弗朗蒂羅(Sharron Frontiero)辯護，後者曾拒絕為丈夫提供妻子為男性提供的福利。金斯伯格引用19世紀女權倡導者莎拉·格莉姆克(Sarah Grimké)的話告訴坐在法官席上的九名男性：「我不要求任何關於我的性別的幫助。」「我只要求男人們把腳從我們脖子上移開。」金斯伯格贏了，儘管法院的支持率很低。隨著她繼續努力擴大這種影響力，她繼續在哥倫比亞大學任教，並撰寫法律評論文章。1979年，在吉米·卡特籤署擴大聯邦司法機構的立法後，金斯伯格開始尋求法官職位。
Carter was determined to appoint women and asked Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who had argued Roe, to help him find them. By 1970, only three in a hundred lawyers and fewer than two hundred of the nation’s ten thousand judges were women. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, on hearing that Richard Nixon was considering nominating a woman to the Court, drafted a letter of resignation. 「Feminist Picked for U.S. Court of Appeals Here,」 the Washington Post announced in December of 1979, even before Carter had officially named Ginsburg to the D.C. Circuit.
卡特決心任命女性，並請曾為羅伊辯護的律師莎拉·韋丁頓(Sarah Weddington)幫助他找到她們。到1970年，每100名律師中只有3名是女性，全國一萬名法官中只有不到200名是女性。1971年，首席大法官沃倫·伯格(Warren Burger)聽說理察·尼克森(Richard Nixon)正在考慮提名一名女性進入最高法院，於是起草了一封辭職信。1979年12月，甚至在卡特正式任命金斯伯格為華盛頓巡迴上訴法院法官之前，華盛頓郵報就宣布：「女權主義者被選為美國最高上訴法院的人選。」
未完待續