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My Own Words

Book by Ruth Bader Ginsburg · 15 quotes · Argument, Oral, Age

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My Own Words Quotes

“Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature - equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

“Twenty-one months after her admission, Lockwood became the first woman to participate in oral argument at the Court. She next and last argued before the Court in 1906. She was then seventy-five. Using the skill she had gained over a thirty-year span in her specialty—pressing money claims against the United States—she helped to secure a five-million-dollar award for Eastern Cherokee Indians whose ancestral lands had been taken from them without just compensation.”

“A question I am often asked: What does women’s participation in numbers on the bench add to our judicial system? It is true, as Jeanne Coyne of Minnesota's Supreme Court famously said: at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same decision. But it is also true that women, like persons of different racial groups and ethnic origins, contribute what the late Fifth Circuit Judge Alvin Rubin described as “a distinctive medley of views influenced by differences in biology, cultural impact, and life experience.” Our system of justice is surely richer for the diversity of background and experience of its judges. It was poorer when nearly all of its participants were cut from the same mold.”