ECONOMIST: Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18th
經濟學人：魯斯·巴德·金斯伯格於9月18日去世
The liberal conscience of America’s Supreme Court was 87
美國最高法院的自由良心是87歲
ON THE EVENING of July 11th 2015, Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera. There was nothing odd in that. Opera, after the law, was her great love, the only place where she could leave the legal world behind. When she worked on her opinions, often into the small hours if her husband Marty was not around to make her go to bed, she would usually have opera, or some other beautiful music, playing in the background. The talent she most coveted was to have a glorious voice, like Renata Tebaldi perhaps. As it was, she sang only in the shower and in her dreams.
2015年7月11日晚上，魯斯·巴德·金斯伯格去看歌劇。這沒什麼奇怪的。歌劇，在法律之後，是她最大的愛，是她唯一可以離開法律世界的地方。當她堅持自己的觀點時，如果丈夫馬蒂不在身邊讓她上床睡覺，她通常會在後臺播放歌劇或其他優美的音樂。她最渴望的天賦是擁有一副美妙的嗓音，也許像雷納塔·泰巴爾迪一樣。事實上，她只在淋浴和夢中唱歌。
This particular opera, however, 「Scalia/Ginsburg」, by Derrick Wang, was about her. It featured Antonin Scalia, then the court’s most scathing conservative, and she, its most notorious liberal, duelling musically in the styles of Mozart, Verdi and Puccini. He had to go through various trials; she helped him out, at one point soaring through a glass ceiling in the character of the Queen of the Night from 「The Magic Flute」.
然而，這部由德裡克·王創作的歌劇《斯卡利亞/金斯堡》卻是關於她的。安東寧·斯卡利亞是當時宮廷中最嚴厲的保守主義者，而她是最臭名昭著的自由主義者，在音樂上以莫扎特、威爾第和普契尼的風格進行決鬥。他不得不經歷各種考驗；她幫助他擺脫了困境，在《魔笛》中扮演黑夜女王的角色在玻璃天花板上翱翔。
She loved it all. She and Scalia, despite the legal zingers he tossed in her direction, had been best buddies since their days together on the DC federal appeals court in the 1980s. And America’s highest court could be just as dramatic, even if more sombrely arrayed. There she sat, this tiny little woman perched among the black-robed men, and there she disagreed. For all but three of her 27 years she had one or two sisterly colleagues, but her opinions still marked her out. She berated the court when, in 2014, it let employers foist their religious beliefs on their workers by not paying for cover for contraception. She was outraged when, in the Citizens United case of 2010, it refused to limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts, as if America had all the democracy that money could buy. And she especially attacked the striking down, in 2013, of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v Holder, on the supposition that racism had waned enough to discard it. That, she wrote, was 「like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.」
她喜歡這一切。她和斯卡利亞自20世紀80年代在DC聯邦上訴法院一起工作以來，一直是最好的朋友，儘管他在法律上對她百般刁難。美國最高法院也可能同樣引人注目，即使穿著更加邋遢。她坐在那裡，這個小小的女人坐在黑袍男人中間，她不同意。在她27年的時間裡，除了三年之外，她都有一兩個姐妹般的同事，但她的觀點仍然讓她與眾不同。2014年，當法院允許僱主通過不支付避孕費用將他們的宗教信仰強加給他們的員工時，她嚴厲指責了法院。她被激怒了公民聯盟在2010年的案例中，它拒絕限制公司對獨立政治廣播的資助，好像美國擁有金錢可以買到的所有民主。她還特別抨擊了2013年對《投票權法案》第5條的否決謝爾比縣訴霍爾德假設種族主義已經衰落到足以拋棄它。她寫道，這就像「在暴雨中扔掉雨傘，因為你沒有淋溼。」
Being contrary, she needed to be extra sharp. She took pride in the speed with which she wrote opinions, and in their clarity. Twice a week she lifted weights, did push-ups and generally honed herself into a lean, Armani-clad contender. In oral argument she liked to leap in first, keen to establish at the start whether the plaintiff had really been damaged, or not. (Her shy, soft, pause-filled delivery off the bench really speeded up then, to Brooklyn fast.) She often announced her dissents orally, from the bench, to show how much she disagreed, and in the trying 5-4 years when she regularly led the dissenters she made sure they spoke with one voice. On those days she wore her 「dissenting collar」, a grey, stony, quietly menacing number. It fitted the occasion nicely.
恰恰相反，她需要格外敏銳。她為自己寫觀點的速度和清晰感到自豪。她每周舉重兩次，做伏地挺身，通常鍛鍊自己成為一個瘦瘦的、身著阿瑪尼的競爭者。在口頭辯論中，她喜歡搶先一步，急於在一開始就確定原告是否真的受到了損害。(她害羞、溫柔、充滿停頓的替補上場真的加速了，快到布魯克林了。)她經常在法庭上口頭宣布她的反對意見，以顯示她有多不同意，在她定期領導反對者的艱難的5-4年中，她確保他們用一個聲音說話。在那些日子裡，她戴著她的「異議領」，一個灰色的，冷酷的，不動聲色的威脅數字。它非常適合這個場合。
Yet she did not see herself as disruptive, let alone an activist. If she became more of a dissenter with the years, it was because the court, after 2006, swung over to the activist right. At heart she was still what she had always been, a judicial minimalist. She was stunned by the lack of caution in the Roe v Wade ruling of 1973 that legalised abortion; though she certainly approved of the outcome, reform should have come through state legislatures, where it was slowly starting to appear. She was shocked too when the court, while upholding Obamacare, found it illegal under the commerce clause of the constitution; that had been Congress’s domain since the 1930s. In her dissents she sometimes appealed to Congress to correct the law and occasionally, to her delight, it did.
然而，她並不認為自己具有破壞性，更不用說是一名活動家了。如果說隨著時間的推移，她變得越來越持不同意見，那是因為2006年後，法院轉向了激進的右翼。本質上，她仍然是她一直以來的樣子，一個司法上的極簡主義者。她對考試中缺乏謹慎感到震驚羅伊訴韋德1973年墮胎合法化的裁決；儘管她肯定贊同這一結果，但改革本應通過州立法機構進行，在那裡改革才慢慢開始出現。當法院在支持歐巴馬醫改的同時，根據憲法中的商業條款認定其非法時，她也感到震驚；自20世紀30年代以來，這一直是國會的領地。在她的反對意見中，她有時會呼籲國會修改法律，偶爾，令她高興的是，國會也這麼做了。
Her legal hero was an incrementalist: Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the court, who had laboured to dismantle segregation. Even when she was (as she operatically liked to say) a flaming feminist litigator, bringing cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s on behalf of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, she saw herself first as a teacher, instructing the all-male court how women felt about laws which 「protected」 and thus demeaned them. She could have been furious about the prejudice she had faced herself, being Jewish as well as a woman: failing, for example, to get job offers from any New York law firm after leaving Columbia Law School, though she became the first tenured professor there. But she proceeded carefully, politely, case by case, and bad laws tumbled. When she joined the highest court her success rate fell, but her approach, as only the second woman there, was often the same: to explain to the male justices how it felt to be barred from the Virginia Military Institute or, as a teenage girl, to be strip-searched. Because the court just did not know these things.
她的法律英雄是一個漸進主義者:瑟古德·馬歇爾，法庭上的第一位黑人法官，他努力消除種族隔離。甚至當她還是一名熱情的女權主義訴訟律師時(就像她喜歡說的那樣)，在20世紀70年代代表美國公民自由聯盟的婦女權利項目向最高法院提起訴訟時，她首先把自己視為一名教師，指導全男性法庭女性對「保護」並因此貶低她們的法律的感受。作為猶太人和女性，她可能會對自己面臨的偏見感到憤怒:例如，在離開哥倫比亞大學法學院後，她沒有得到任何紐約律師事務所的工作機會，儘管她成為了那裡的第一位終身教授。但是她小心翼翼，彬彬有禮，一個接一個地進行，糟糕的法律被推翻了。當她加入最高法院時，她的成功率下降了，但她作為那裡的第二位女性，她的做法通常是一樣的:向男性法官解釋被維吉尼亞軍事學院禁止進入的感覺，或者作為一個十幾歲的女孩，被脫衣搜身的感覺。因為法院不知道這些事情。
The role of women’s champion was too narrow, though. Her arguments in discrimination cases were based squarely on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Gross generalisations about 「how women were」 or 「how men were」 had to be forgotten. Her dream was a world in which men and women cared for their children equally and had equal opportunities themselves. And the constitution had to embrace everyone: Lilly Ledbetter, struggling to achieve equal pay; Stephen Wiesenfeld, trying as a widower to get the same benefits as a widow would; Maetta Vance, afraid to tell a racist supervisor to buzz off; the young men of 18 in Oklahoma who just wanted to buy a beer, as girls of 18 could. She spoke for all such everyday people.
不過，女子冠軍的角色太狹隘了。她在歧視案件中的論點完全基於第14修正案對法律平等保護的保證。關於「女人怎麼樣」或「男人怎麼樣」的粗略概括必須被遺忘。她的夢想是一個男人和女人平等地照顧他們的孩子，自己也有平等機會的世界。憲法必須包容每一個人:莉莉·萊德貝特，努力實現同工同酬；史蒂芬·維森菲爾德，作為一個鰥夫，試圖獲得與寡婦相同的福利；梅塔·萬斯，害怕告訴一個種族主義的主管走開；俄克拉荷馬州18歲的年輕人只想買瓶啤酒，而18歲的女孩可以。她代表所有這樣的普通人說話。
As the court shifted steadily rightward she became more determined to stay on. She redoubled her exercises, despite her age and the bouts of cancer, colorectal and pancreatic, which annoyingly forced her one day to take part in oral arguments from her bed. She found herself becoming an icon, a face on T-shirts and the subject of biopics: Notorious RBG, mystifying but fun. What did not change was her regard for her colleagues, conservative or not, in the wonderfully civilised family that was the court. For each of them, after all, their basic motivation was the same. At the end of 「Scalia/Ginsburg」, the two famous foes-and-friends sang together the aria which was her favourite: 「Separate strands unite in friction/To protect our country’s core...And this is why we will see justice done./We are different;/We are one.」
隨著法院穩步向右移動，她變得更有決心留下來。她加倍鍛鍊，儘管她的年齡和癌症，結腸直腸癌和胰腺癌的發作，這令人惱火地迫使她有一天在床上參加口頭辯論。她發現自己成為了一個偶像，一張t恤上的臉和傳記片的主題:臭名昭著的RBG，神秘但有趣。沒有改變的是她對同事的尊重，不管他們是否保守，在這個非常文明的家庭裡，這就是宮廷。畢竟，對他們每個人來說，他們的基本動機是一樣的。在《斯卡利亞/金斯堡》的結尾，兩個著名的敵友一起演唱了她最喜歡的詠嘆調:「分開的線在摩擦中結合在一起/保護我們國家的核心...這就是為什麼我們將看到正義得到伸張。/我們不一樣；/我們是一體的。」
本文章原文來自經濟學人，不代表公眾號立場
英文文章及圖片來源：
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/09/23/ruth-bader-ginsburg-died-on-september-18th
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