Quotes from Jeffrey Rosen

The idea was there from the beginning: equality. And yet you can read every page of your pocket Constitution and you will not find, in the original Constitution, the word equal, or equality, even though equality was a main theme of the Declaration of Independence. The word equal becomes a part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment.

To go back to Brown, a concern the United States government had was definitely part of the picture. At that time, we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the State Department filed a brief in Brown v. Board urging the Court to end what was basically apartheid in America. It said, we are being embarrassed constantly by the Soviet Union charging that the United States is a racist society. Please, Court, help us to end that era.

My mother's advice was, don't lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those, she said, will just sap time; they don't get you where you want to be.

Like Jefferson, Brandeis believed that the greatest threat to our constitutional liberties was an uneducated citizenry, and that democracy could not survive both ignorant and free. And

From her days as an advocate to her days as a justice, Ginsburg insisted that men and women would be truly equal only when they took equal responsibility for child rearing. She wrote as early as 1972 that "child rearing, as distinguished from child bearing, does not involve a physical characteristic unique to one sex

If we imagine the worst-case scenario, with Roe v. Wade overruled, there would remain many states that would not go back to the way it once was. It doesn't matter what Congress or the state legislatures do, there will be other states that provide this facility, and women will have access to it if they can pay for it. Women who can't pay are the only women who would be affected.

By the way, I said my affirmative action plan would be for men as teachers in kindergarten and grade schools. I think it would be wonderful for children, if they could see men in caring roles just as they see women.

The Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and it should see to it that Congress remembers that Congress is to pass no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

don't know an age in which the Court has really led. Let's return to Brown v. Board, probably the most celebrated decision of the twentieth century, and rightly so. But it wasn't just Thurgood Marshall's great advocacy and his careful plan working up to Brown. It was the aftermath of World War II; we had just fought a war against odious racism, and yet our own troops were separated by race.

Jeffrey, you may kiss the bride. and Lauren, you may embrace each other for the first kiss of your marriage. The

And so that's my ideal: a child should have two caring parents, and if every child could grow up with a father and a mother, both of whom love and care for the child, ours would be a much better world.

For Ginsburg, the #MeToo movement is a vindication of the vision of feminism that she championed in the 1970s: a rejection of the traditional idea that women and men occupy separate spheres in which women are naturally passive and men aggressive; an attack on laws treating men and women differently, especially those designed to protect "the weaker sex"; and an insistence that special benefits for women be extended to men.

I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don't think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are.

You can see what happened in the seventies. Up until then, the Supreme Court never saw a gender-based classification it didn't like or regarded as unconstitutional.

Well, the more women—this is something that Justice O'Connor often said, that women of our age should get out there and make a good show, and that will encourage other women, and the more women that are out there doing things, the better off all of us will be.

My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor's right notion, but a woman's right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.

She viewed her advocacy not as a crusade for abstract principles but as a fight for justice for individual men and women disadvantaged by laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.

So, my objective was to take the Court step by step to the realization, in Justice Brennan's words, that the pedestal on which some thought women were standing all too often turned out to be a cage.

Well, emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive. They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control. In the days when I was a flaming feminist litigator, I never said to judges who asked improper questions, "You sexist pig.

Ginsburg noted that women's equality was a less prominent theme in Roe, which had "coupled with the rights of the pregnant woman the free exercise of her physician's medical judgment," and she suggested that Roe might have been less controversial if the decision had focused more precisely on women's equality.