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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and let's continue with your course on what Ruth Bader Ginsburg meant to you. I would like to extend a specific invitation, in addition to some of the people that we're hanging on right now, to women lawyers. Women lawyers or women judges, if any happen to be listening right now. Building on the story that Jami Floyd just told about Ginsburg being refused for a clerkship by Justice Frankfurter just because she was a woman. What did Ginsburg mean to you as an inspiration for your career? Women listening right now happened to be lawyers or even judges; 646-435-7280. Here's something RBG said in 2018 to a naturalization ceremony of immigrants becoming US citizens.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City's garment district and a Supreme Court Justice? One generation; my own life bears witness. The difference between the opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.

Brian: Making reference to the generational story that Jami was just laying out some of the details of that generational thought about being a woman with any professional aspirations. Here's Justice Ginsburg with NPR's Nina Totenberg last year referring to the first woman Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the fact that women when they were coming up in the law, couldn't get the high paying jobs in corporate law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I'll tell you what Justice O'Connor once said to me. She said, "Suppose we had come of age at a time when women lawyers were welcome at the bar. You know what? Today, we would be retired partners from some large law firm, but because that route was not open to us, we had to find another way and we both ended up on the United States Supreme Court."

Brian: How about that thought? Oppression, discrimination leading to a more meaningful life in the case of O'Connor and Ginsburg. Women lawyers, women judges, anyone else, what did Ginsberg mean to you? 646-435-7280 and we will keep taking your calls right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll get to as many of you as we can in our remaining time. Claire in Suffolk County. You're on WNYC. Hi, Claire.

Claire: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Do you have an RBG story?

Claire: You asked--

Brian: Yes.

Claire: You asked about women attorneys. I'm one of those and when I applied to law school, it didn't occur to me until I thought about that a little bit more in my application where one has to write an essay and I decided that I would talk about the fact that I was a mom also with two small children. I thought that that was something that the law school should acknowledge and also be consideration too. I had seen some of that discrimination in the workplace where a prospective employer would say during an interview, "What will you do with your children?" That kind of thing. That was an inspiration for me to write my application and write in my essay that having small children can possibly make me a class with some marks against me and that really has to change.

Brian: Yes. She was a [crosstalk] new mother in law school herself. Claire, thank you very much. Eileen in West New York. You're on WNYC. Hi, Eileen.

Eileen: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me. I too am a woman and I'm also a lawyer. I was admitted to the bar in 1972. At Rutgers Law School, 1970 and '71, I was one of the lucky chosen 10 to be in a seminar that we called her Ruthie, was well before the "notorious" moniker, gave on women and the law. There wasn't even a textbook. We studied, we each did a project, mine, because I had been a teacher before I went to law school, was studying pregnancy and maternity leave mandatory in various school systems in New Jersey.

That was before there were computers. I had to know people in various school districts to get the policies. I learned the discrimination and the effect of it that male school boards had determined what was right for women. Sometimes they had to take their leave teaching when they showed, sometimes it was four months up to six months. Some could come back to work when they wanted, and others couldn't even come back for two years because somebody had determined they needed to be at home.

Working with Professor Ginsburg, then Justice Ginsburg, allowed me to see how pervasive our laws were, not only the laws but also practice and how the equal protection amendment, the 14th amendment to the constitution, could be made to be looked at in a different way to include sex. Thank you Ruth for basically opening my eyes and to my inquisitive study and critical thinking regarding the constitution.

Brian: Having had her in school as a prof in 1970, what was it like for you to watch her rise because she wasn't "the notorious RBG" back then?

Eileen: No, she wasn't. First let me say that we at Rutgers were very upset when Columbia lured her away from us, [chuckles] offering her a full professorship from the get-go. Yes, I watched her career. I did some work with her regarding the constitutional litigation, an ACLU work, thereafter. I sent her, of course, a congratulatory note upon her appointment to the supreme court. I have watched her and I have read every opinion she has ever written [crosstalk]

Brian: Eileen, thank you so, so much. Jason in Ramsey, New Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I was a camper at the camp that you were a counselor right way ahead of you. I'm probably 10 years older than you-

Brian: Balfour Lake Camp?

Jason: -at Balfour. Balfour. I remember the older counselors talking about this person, Kiki Bader, quite often. Then I saw them speaking with her. They were just hanging out. It was as if that she was holding court because all the guys were listening to her talk. In any event--

Brian: Just by way of background for people who don't know why you're bringing this up. I had mentioned earlier in the program that when I was in college work as a counselor at a boys' camp in the Adirondacks, the partner girls' camp of which called Camp Che-Na-Wah, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was just little Kiki Bader, had gone to 30 years earlier and Jason, you're telling me she was a legend.

Jason: She was a legend there. By the way, it was no coincidence or the reason why she was at Che-Na-Wah. It was her uncle, her mother's brother who owns Che-Na-Wah at the time. He started the camp and owned it at the time, of course. That's why she was at Che-Na-Wah.

Brian: I read in the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, this weekend in remembering Ginsburg, something I didn't know. She had a reputation as the rabbi of the camp when she was 13 years old because she was seen as so learned.

Jason: Correct. I don't remember that, but I heard the same thing. After camp, I never put two and two together because to me, she was always this girl, Kiki. I didn't know her as Ruth at all. No one did. It was only when she became a judge, I believe. I was reading something in The Times of a case that she was involved in and it mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I still didn't know. Then it hit me that that must be the same Ruth Kiki Bader-

Brian: That was Kiki Bader. Great stuff.

Jason: -that I remember from camp.

Brian: Jason, thank you so much. Emma in Hudson, New York. You're in WNYC. Hi, Emma.

Emma: Hi. My first time calling, longtime listener.

Brian: Glad you're on.

Emma: I'm a documentary filmmaker. In 1995, I interviewed Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a documentary I was making on trailblazing women and it was a wonderful interview. The way I got to her is-- Of course I got to one of her assistants and told him what I was trying to do and the next day, I get a call and she was Bader Ginsburg on the phone. [chuckles] It was astonishing to me, but she told two stories that I don't think are heard a lot.

Brian: We have 30 seconds so tell us the short version.

Emma: Okay. In the book Burning Through the Ages, was a thing she did when she was an undergraduate at Cornell before she even wanted to go to law school, and she read the Red Channels and The Blacklist. Her comment on it was, "I came to appreciate what law could do both in restraining and controlling people and in implementing the highest goals and aspirations of our society."

Brian: You know what? Because we can't improve upon that and we don't have any more time, we're going to have to leave it there. It's a beautiful quote on which to end. Emma, thank you so much for your call and to all of you, with your personal connections to Ruth Bader Ginsburg as well as the more professional and worldly ones that concern us all.

Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on our daily podcast. Our interns are Dan Girma and Erica Scalise. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Juliana Fonda is at the audio controls, most days along with Liora Noam-Kravitz, Matt Marando, and Milton Ruiz. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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