Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Life

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time,” Ginsburg said.

From justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We can learn a lot from her example

Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, Bader taught at Rutgers University Law School and then at Columbia University, where she became its first female tenured professor. She served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980. Named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, she continued to argue for gender equality in such cases as United States v. Virginia. She died September 18, 2020, due to complications from metastatic pancreas cancer.

For your marriage life.

Another often-asked question when I speak in public: “Do you have some good advice you might share with us?” Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. “In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through 56 years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.

There is a way out.

Advice from my father-in-law has also served me well. He gave it during my gap years, 1954 to ‘56, when my husband, Marty, was fulfilling his obligation to the Army as an artillery officer at Fort Sill, Okla. By the end of 1954, my pregnancy was confirmed. We looked forward to becoming three in July 1955, but I worried about starting law school the next year with an infant to care for. Father’s advice: “Ruth, if you don’t want to start law school, you have a good reason to resist the undertaking. No one will think less of you if you make that choice. But if you really want to study law, you will stop worrying and find a way to manage child and school.” And so, Marty and I did, by engaging a nanny on school days from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.

Chase two rabbits and do get both.

Work-life balance was a term not yet coined in the years my children were young; it is aptly descriptive of the time distribution I experienced. My success in law school, I have no doubt, was in large measure because of baby Jane. I attended classes and studied diligently until 4 in the afternoon; the next hours were Jane’s time, spent at the park, playing silly games or singing funny songs, reading picture books and A. A. Milne poems, and bathing and feeding her. After Jane’s bedtime, I returned to the law books with renewed will. Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

What are you good at?

I have had more than a little bit of luck in life, but nothing equals in magnitude my marriage to Martin D. Ginsburg. I do not have words adequate to describe my super smart, exuberant, ever-loving spouse. Early on in our marriage, it became clear to him that cooking was not my strong suit. To the eternal appreciation of our food-loving children (we became four in 1965, when our son, James, was born), Marty made the kitchen his domain and became chef supreme in our home.

Widen your comfort zone.

Despite our strong disagreements on cardinal issues — think, for example, of controls on political campaign spending, affirmative action, access to abortion — we genuinely respect one another, even enjoy one another’s company.

From the journey of a thousand miles an inch.

Earlier, I spoke of great changes I have seen in women’s occupations. Yet one must acknowledge the still bleak part of the picture. Most people in poverty in the United States and the world over are women and children, women’s earnings here and abroad trail the earnings of men with comparable education and experience, our workplaces do not adequately accommodate the demands of childbearing and child-rearing, and we have yet to devise effective ways to ward off sexual harassment at work and domestic violence in our homes. I am optimistic, however, that movement toward an enlistment of the talent of all who compose “We, the people,” will continue.

Try to leave the world a little better than you found it.

Justice Ginsburg used her law degree as a force for good. In 2013, she told my Berkeley Law students, “If you survive three years of law school, you have a talent and skill that is precious, but if you use it for only personal gain—you won’t get long-term satisfaction. Do something outside of yourself that will help make things better for others not as fortunate as you.” Hers is a model career of what someone armed with a law degree can do to advance the interests of others and make ours a more just society. I hope that her example continues to inspire lawyers to do the same for generations to come.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Most Powerful Quotes

Keep your cool.

The Justice was a model of cool. As she once said, “Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.” Her law clerks had an up-close window into how she lived out this creed. As she said on another occasion, “Fight for the things that you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” She never attacked people, but rather ideas, and she did so in a measured, careful way designed to bring others along. This was a huge factor in the many great successes she achieved both as an advocate and as a jurist.

The Constitution belongs to all of us.

Justice Ginsburg’s greatest legacy is how her work helped ensure that everyone has, as she wrote for the Court in VMI, an “equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their talents and capacities.” This ideal animated everything that she did.

The Justice appreciated that to achieve this end would require more than court opinions. “[T]he Justices,” she said at her confirmation hearings, “do not guard constitutional rights alone. Courts share that profound responsibility with Congress, the President, the States, and the people.” She continued: “Constant realization of a more perfect Union, the Constitution’s aspiration, requires the widest, broadest, deepest participation on matters of government and government policy.” It is not enough, in other words, for each of us to look to the courts or even other government leaders to “guard constitutional rights.” very single one of us has a responsibility to do our part to advance the values at the core of our national compact and work to build “a more perfect Union.”

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