Nichola Gutgold has begun researching the communication styles and
strategies of the women Supreme Court justices.. She was delighted when Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg granted her request for a personal interview and she met
the justice in her chambers in Washington, D.C. on August 19, 2010.  Her speaking style is slow, meticulous
and careful. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s communication is illustrative of her approach
to the law: just what is
needed. She tells her law
clerks: “Don’t write sentences
that people will have to re-read.
Same is true of public speaking.”
Hers is direct, to the
point and never excessive. She
says: “My effort was to speak
slowly so that that ideas could be grasped.” In her public speeches her style is professorial, hearkening
back to her days as a law professor, first at Rutgers School of Law, briefly at
Harvard Law School and at Columbia School of Law.
In
2007 when she read two stinging dissents from the bench, to criticize the
majority for opinions that she said jeopardize women's rights, she was indeed,
deliberately making a statement. In one case, in which the court
upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act seven years after having struck
down a similar state law, she noted that the Court was now “differently
composed than it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion
regulation.” In Ledbetter v. Goodyear, speaking for the three other dissenting
justices, Justice Ginsburg's voice was even and measured, and the message was
potent and immediately impactful. In
this utterance she was speaking to, as she put it: “convey a message I thought was so right and proper.”  In her dissent she described
the Court’s reading of the law as “parsimonious” and added: “In our view, the
court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women
can be victims of pay discrimination.” Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant
in Gadsden, Alabama, from 1979 until her retirement in 1998. For most of those
years, she worked as an area manager, a position largely occupied by men.
Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing
substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison
to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. The Lilly
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act restored workers' rights to challenge illegal wage
discrimination in the federal courts.
In a personal interview in her Chambers at the Supreme
Court, I asked her why reading her dissent aloud felt like a powerful way to
express her views. She told me: “Most often I do not
announce. I write it out. But if I want to emphasize that the Court
not only got it wrong, but egregiously so, reading aloud a dissent can have an
immediate objective.”  Only six times previous to 2007, in thirteen years on the
Court did Justice Ginsburg read her dissent aloud, and never twice in one
term. She told her audience at a lecture
in 2007: “I described from the
bench two dissenting opinions. The
first deplored the Court’s approval of a federal ban on so-called ‘partial-birth
abortion.’ Departing from decades
of precedent, the Court placed its imprimatur on an anti-abortion measure that
lacked an exception safeguarding a woman’s health. Next, I objected to the Court’s decision making it virtually
impossible for victims of pay discrimination to mount a successful Title VII
challenge.” She told me that
perhaps her dissent of the Court’s approval of a federal ban on partial-birth
abortion “will appeal to a future Court.” She added:
“I think long term my opinion will be the law.”
The
“immediate impact” of Justice Ginsburg’s oral dissent was realized in the
Ledbetter v. Goodyear case. She
told me that “Several members of Congress responded within days after the Court’s
decision was issued.” With
Lilly Ledbetter present, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
into law on January 29, 2009. Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s public speaking is similar to her strategy on behalf of
the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU in the 1970s: slowly, meticulously, carefully and just what is
needed. She reflected on her
life’s work and said, slowly and distinctly: “What a luxury I had to be an advocate for people who
needed my services and to work for
a cause for society.”
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