10 years prove Ginsburg a peacemaker

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is all business during the court's public sessions. She zeroes in on lawyers who haven't done their homework and her careful, reedy tone can quickly undercut some of her more flamboyant colleagues on the bench.

A few in the courtroom, however, briefly see a very different side of the Supreme Court's second female justice, whose 10th anniversary on the court is today. Female lawyers taking their oaths as members of the Supreme Court Bar often see a broad grin on Ginsburg's face when they rise for an introduction to the court.

Ginsburg gained national prominence arguing, and winning, women's rights cases before the Supreme Court. She was a long-serving federal judge when President Bill Clinton picked her as his first Supreme Court appointment in 1993.

The first justice chosen by a Democratic president in decades, Ginsburg votes most often with the court's more liberal wing. That means she frequently is on the losing side when the court splits 5-4 along ideological lines.

Ginsburg, 70, has emerged as a quiet peacemaker on the court, a liberal whom conservatives can admire, said Douglas Kmiec, a conservative constitutional scholar at Pepperdine University's law school.

Ginsburg usually sticks to the narrow meaning of laws and tries to keep the court's nose out of problems that can be solved elsewhere, Kmiec and other law professors said. That cautious approach sometimes means she puts her own views aside.

"She always uses the phrase, "Get it right,"' said W. William Hodes, an Indianapolis lawyer and a former Ginsburg law clerk. "Part of getting it right means not always voting for what you personally think is correct."

Ginsburg had no such quandary in the case for which she is probably best known. She wrote the 1996 ruling that forced tax-supported Virginia Military Institute to open its doors to women.

Ginsburg might have used the opportunity to revel in what must have seemed a crowning moment in her own career as a women's rights lawyer, but the ruling contains no gloating.

"Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less, under the state's obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection," Ginsburg wrote.

She declined to be interviewed for this story.

Ginsburg went public with news that she had colon cancer four years ago, and described her treatment and recovery in blunt terms. She never missed a day on the bench through several months of radiation and chemotherapy.

"My wife has always been a very hard worker," said Ginsburg's husband, Washington lawyer and law professor Martin D. Ginsburg.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a passionate opera fan, and once confessed that she had hoped to be a diva despite an utter lack of singing ability. Less well known are two other hobbies: water-skiing and horseback riding. She is said to be quite accomplished at both.

Cases often depend on the vote of O'Connor or fellow center-right "swing voter" Anthony M. Kennedy. Conservative firebrand Antonin Scalia and civil rights iconoclast Clarence Thomas are more likely to grab headlines.

"She's not typically going to be the pivot on which the court turns," Columbia University law professor Michael Dorf said.

That, said people who know her, suits Ginsburg just fine.

AGE, BIRTH DATE: 70; March 15, 1933. New York.

EDUCATION: Earned a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell University. Attended Harvard Law School and received her law degree from Columbia Law School.

CAREER: Law professor at Rutgers University law school 1963-1972; law professor at Columbia Law School 1972-1980; lawyer, American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project, 1971-1980, and ACLU general counsel, 1973-1980; appointed to be a federal appeals court judge in 1980, served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1980-1993; nominated as a Supreme Court justice by President Bill Clinton in June 1993; sworn in Aug. 10, 1993.

FAMILY: Husband, Georgetown University law professor Martin D. Ginsburg; two children.

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