Introduction of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Carolyn A. Wilson Lecturer
Wellesley College
November 13, 1998

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

Welcome to the Wilson Lecture, our most important annual intellectual event. It is wonderful to see so many members of the college community here tonight. I am told we have a full house -- more than 1,200 -- to hear our very distinguished guest, the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Welcome, Justice Ginsburg. We are honored that you are here -- and clearly excited too, based on the turn out, on a Friday night no less!

Wellesley's annual Carolyn A. Wilson Lecture is named for an alumna from the Class of 1910. A pioneering reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Carolyn Wilson was one of the few women anywhere in the world who covered World War I, bringing riveting stories back from the battlefronts.

Many years later (in 1962) she endowed this lectureship, hopeful that it would continue, over the years, to engage Wellesley students in the most significant issues of the day and provide opportunities to learn about them first-hand, from leading scholars and activists -- people who could bring the latest news from the front.

We have with us tonight a woman who is making news on the front -- a different sort of front, a jurist who for years has been arguing successfully, case-by-case, that society would benefit enormously if women were regarded as persons equal in stature to men -- eccentric idea that; the same idea that spawned this college.

Born in the Flatbush Section of Brooklyn, N.Y., to Nathan and Celia Amster Bader, Justice Ginsburg attended the New York public schools and graduated from James Madison High School where, the New York Times reports, she was a baton twirler (true?) and an editor of the school paper. (Carolyn Wilson would have approved). She went on to earn her bachelor's at Cornell in 1954, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with high honors in government.

She attended Harvard Law School, as one of nine women in a class of 400, but transferred to Columbia when her husband Martin, a noted tax attorney, took a job in New York. She was elected to Law Review and, in 1959, graduated at the top of her Columbia Law School class.

She clerked for a federal district court judge and then moved into teaching, first at Rutgers University Law School and then at Columbia, where, in 1972, she was the first woman to become a tenured full professor of law. Across the country at that time -- remember, this was only 26 years ago -- there were only 20 women law professors.

At Columbia, Professor Ginsburg was the founder and counsel for the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, a position from which she argued six cases before the Supreme Court, five of which resulted in landmark decisions on gender equity.

In 1980 President Carter nominated her to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a position she held until, 13 years later, President Clinton appointed her to the highest court of the land, the 107th associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and only the second woman.

A soft-spoken opera fan whose tenacity and legal acuity are legendary, she is known as a stickler for details, a graceful and eloquent writer, and a legal scholar profoundly interested in the real-life implications of the law. She wrote the court's opinion in the 1996 VMI case we all watched with care, a judgment for which Phillis Schlafly excoriated her for writing "her radical feminist goals into the Constitution."

Justice Ginsburg's last appearance as an attorney arguing a case before the Supreme Court resulted in the following question from Justice Renquist, who hadn't been sympathetic to her arguments on behalf of women:

"You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony on the new dollar, then?" he asked. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said nothing, but what ran through her mind she said was "We won't settle for tokens." She hasn't and she doesn't and we are all the beneficiaries of her unwillingness to settle.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been a strong and steady voice for justice, for gender equity, and for civil rights, an effective voice that has been changing the legal landscape step by careful step. It's a great privilege to have her here with us this evening.

Please join me in welcoming to Wellesley College the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg.