Ginsburg Penned Fierce Dissents In Fight For Civil, Voting And Women's Rights
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s razor-sharp mind, her wit and her deft mastery of language made her one of the best — and most biting — writers of Supreme Court rulings and dissents in memory. Her death Friday has taken from the court a legal legend.
Despite the utter control and careful decorum she exhibited in public, her outrage and even fury were palpable in her writing — and in face-offs with lawyers arguing their cases in court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once called her a “tigress on civil procedure.” She will “take a lawyer who is making a ridiculous argument and just shake him like a dog with a bone,” he noted in a 2013 interview.
That ferocity was evident in her writing, especially in dissents in cases on women’s, civil and voting rights.
Ginsburg was so obviously upset about a Supreme Court ruling in 2000 that handed the presidential election that year to George W. Bush over his Democratic presidential rival, Al Gore, that she breached decorum by replacing the usual ending “Respectfully, I dissent” to simply “I dissent.”
Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. Dissent in voting rights case
In an ominous harbinger of what Americans could be in for this year, the court in Bush v. Gore overturned a recount decision by Florida’s Supreme Court that resulted in handing Bush all of the state’s electoral votes. It was a decision Ginsburg considered an outrageous overreach of power by the Supreme Court over a state.
“I might join the chief justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law,” Ginsburg noted sarcastically.
“The extraordinary setting of this case has obscured the ordinary principle that dictates its proper resolution: federal courts defer to state high courts’ interpretations of their state’s own law. This principle reflects the core of...
