Quotes from Jeffrey Rosen

I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.

[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.

Ginsburg's central premise is that antiabortion laws, like employment discrimination against pregnant women, are based on "stereotypical assumptions" about women as caregivers. Today, pro-choice scholars, advocates, and citizens, including millions of young women, have embraced her emphasis on equality, rather than privacy, as the soundest constitutional foundation for the right to choose.

Ginsburg appreciated that Rehnquist assigned the most interesting cases on the basis not of ideology but of which justices had completed their previous assignments on time.

could become occasionally tyrannical, and that democratic liberty would falter if citizens ceased to be engaged. But he also had faith that a virtuous and engaged citizenry—grounded in small communities—could, through deliberation, achieve a good in common that they could not know alone.

Ginsburg believes that the Constitution should be interpreted to root out unconscious biases that subordinate women. But as she recognized decades ago, true equality requires that men and women work together to root out unconscious bias in families and in the workplace.

Even in the worst case, if Roe is overruled, there's no woman of means who could not get a safe abortion someplace in the United States. There will be a core of states that will never go back to the days of unsafe, back alley abortions. So, poor women have no choice, women of means will be able to decide for themselves.

There's been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard. That's one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know: everyone deserves a fair hearing.

So someone got the even brighter idea to put up a curtain between the people who are auditioning and the judges. And that simple device almost overnight led to women showing up in symphony orchestras in numbers.

RBG: The Declaration is our first statement of the idea of equality, though that great statement, "all [persons] are created equal," was penned by a slave owner.

There's a thought that the ERA will succeed if three more states ratify, but I don't think you can play the game that way, because a number of states have withdrawn their ratification, so you'd have to count those. It would be better to start over. I hope that that will happen.

Equal citizenship stature for men and women belongs in any fundamental instrument of government. It should be as basic to society as free speech and freedom of religion. And it is stated among basic rights in every post-1950 constitution in the world.

The original Constitution, as amended by the Bill of Rights, includes many themes that would apply to society as it evolves over time, freedom of speech, press, and religion, and due process of law, most notably. And equality imbued the Declaration of Independence although the stain of slavery kept that ideal out of the Constitution until 1868.

Yes, and an important part is the discontent seen among people who feel that our institutions of government pay no attention to them, as illustrated by J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

Hope springs eternal. I try to be as persuasive as I can in conference and in writing opinions. Sometimes I'm successful, sometimes not. But I will continue to try.

There is no right of privacy written into the Constitution. There is the Fourth Amendment, protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there is a notion, an important notion, of liberty—that we should have liberty to carry on with our lives without Big Brother Government looking over our shoulder. That idea has come from the guarantee, the due process guarantee of liberty, rather than an explicit right of privacy.

The Social Security Act—the name of the ACT is FICA, the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. Well, it was sold to the public as an earned right. Work, you pay an insurance premium, but you are not paying an insurance premium at all. You're paying a tax, pure and simple. That's what Social Security is. It's a tax we pay so that people who are no longer able to work will be taken care of.

RBG: I should define the term activism as I used it for that purpose. It is a court that is not at all hesitant to overturn legislation passed by the Congress

Sometimes Congress is helpful. There's a difference between a case that involves constitutional interpretation, where the Court says, "This is what the Constitution means." Well, that's what it means until the Court overrules its decision or there's a constitutional amendment. But when you're dealing with statutes like our principal employment discrimination law, Title VII, if the Court gets it wrong, Congress can fix it.

In my long life, I have seen many changes. Changes for the better. The most important is that we are not using the talent of all the people, not just half of them.

We need to protect the same amount of cognitive liberty in an age where you can invade people's thoughts without physically intruding into their homes than you did at the time of the framing.

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes never believed in the truth and morality of the laws he was upholding. He said, "I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people."

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.