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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the oldest person on the U.S. Supreme Court dies at 87. The U.S. Supreme Court is unique in that there is no retirement age as in India and other countries. She died of pancreatic cancer. She is one of the rare jurists in that she continued to work almost to the end. She was unique in other ways because she got along well with colleagues on the court of different persuasion. Justice Scalia who was the complete opposite in thinking and views than Ginsburg said that this did not matter much as Ginsburg was "fun to be with." Former president Clinton nominated Ginsburg in 1993. Recently Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined Roberts, Alito, and Thomas,  for a 5-4 majority on the court for conservatives. Ginsburg was a woman's rights advocate in the 1970's. She will be missed mostly for her vigorous personality and feisty attitude to life working and being active even with her health condition. The death of Ginsburg means that the court is now deadlocked with 4 to 4 and no majority for conservatives or liberals. The country has also changed. Both conservatives and liberals claim they uphold the constitution of the country. Ginsburg saw this as the inclusiveness the founders intended- for women, and minorities. The conservatives see this also from the vantage of inclusiveness as the country has splintered into those who are largely college educated and tech savy, and the high school educated and less tech savy more rural and in small town that lost jobs and social services from the shift of manufacturing to China. The conservatives  see the lack of inclusiveness for the rural communities and small towns left out in the tech booms of the last three decades and shift of manufacturing overseas. Cultural attitudes add another layer to basic economic issues and a sense of alienation on both sides. In this climate and with an approaching election in 41 days the Republicans want to nominate their conservative choice supported by their Senate majority, and the Democrats want to block this appointment till after the election.   ...

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Supreme Court Justice could simply have retired and let then president Obama appoint her successor. She decided to stay into her eighties. As a result president Trump will choose a conservative as her successor and has the votes lined up in the Senate. In Britain the retirement age was changed from lifetime to 75 by an Act in 1959. In India the Constitution set the retirement age for the Supreme Court at 65. Only in the U.S. is this practice maintained.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg offers some advice to young people- In a marraige she says it helps sometimes to be a bit tone deaf. To ignore that remark someone made or comment which if reacted to would only make one feel worse. Who knows it was not meant that way, and maybe did not reflect the whole way that person felt, or even was transitory, This advice she got from her mother in law. Another piece of advice was from her father in law, to stop worrying and find a way to manage, find a way to do it, for something you want to do but are not sure you can. Something she learned from her colleagues in the court including Justice Scalia, was to get over it, not to spend time thinking about comments that are made or some things that happen in the course of one's daily life that one thinks shouldn't have happened.

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President Trump says it will be a woman, "a very talented, a very brilliant woman," to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Jimmy Carter holds the record for appointing federal judges in one term- 262 judges, 55 minorities, 42 women. In 1978 a Democratic Congress responded to a federal case backlog by creating positions for 150 more federal judges, all of which would be filled by Carter. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of these judges. Carter did not appoint a single Supreme Court Judge yet Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer another of these judges made it to the US Supreme Court.

By comparison for a single term Biden has appointed 235 federal judges. Reagan with 383 and Clinton with 378 hold the record for federal judges appointed  in two terms.

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When Ruth Bader Ginsburg started law school in 1956 women represented 3% of the legal profession in the U.S. It is about one third today.

A piece of advice from her mother in law has served Ginsburg well all these years. She told Ginsburg "in every good marraige it helps sometimes to be a little deaf." Meaning that if an unkind word or thoughtless word is spoken to you best to tune it out and go on anyway. This helps in the workplace. Reacting to someone's unkind words will not advance one's ability to persuade. This is why people of all kinds of persuasion and opinions liked Ginsburg including at the court her complete opposite Justice Scalia. Something we can all learn from Ginsburg.

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In extensive ranging comments Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg describes her positions on Supreme Court cases to Adam Liptak of the NYT. She hopes the next president after this one will be a fine one and is not perturbed by liberals who would like to see her leave so that another liberal could be appointed in her place. Ginsberg is 80 years, but says she works with her trainer twice a week, and works just as hard as in previous terms. She loves her work and will go on as long as she is able to do it. Her work leading the liberal opinion of Justices on the bench shows a senior justice in command of the issues. She has a framed copy of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 on a wall and sees it as a response by Congress to her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire Rubber Company. That 2007 ruling said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposes strict limits for workplace discrimination suits. She sees the present Congress as too timid to take up more issues related to affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. On the court's decision for the Voting Rights Act Ginsberg said in her dissent "It is like throwing away your umbrella after a rainstorm because you don't need it." Her views on Roe vs. Wade are that the law was too sweeping in making abortion rights constitutional and could have taken a different approach of striking down the law in Texas....

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Irin Carmon, author of "Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg," says Ginsburg and Scalia showed that working together at the U.S. Supreme Court was possible, even with very different opinions in interpreting the law. Ginsburg and Scalia were friends, and shared similiar background, coming from boroughs of New York, both law professors, and both judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Both loved Opera performances. On issues such as women's rights, rights of minorities, gay rights, Scalia and Ginsburg were on opposite sides. Yet both enjoyed a long friendship. Scalia went so far as to say that if one disagreed with a colleague on interpretation of the law but could not be a friend, one should get another job. This kind of spirit of working together is now missing in Congress, says Ginsburg, and hopes someday that will happen. At the nation's highest court Ginsburg says Scalia was nice enough to provide her with his dissenting opinion, so that Ginsburg would have more time in preparing her rebuttal....

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A law professor at George Washington University, who also comes from an Sicilian Italian American family, writes about his encounters with Scalia showing passionate opinion and steadfastness. Scalia was educated at Xavier Jesuit high school, and Georgetown University. He remained true to his conservative beliefs about the the law over three decades since his appointment by president Reagan in 1986, and an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as the framers in the eighteenth century had intended. He is the first Italian American Supreme Court Justice, a fact that enabled him to win approval in the Senate 98-0.

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The director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, a student of Scalia, says constitutional law today is more aligned with the U.S. Constitution as a result of three decades of Scalia's work at the Supreme Court. He especially admires Scalia's opinions, even when he disagrees with them, and says Scalia helped promote a better style in opinions of the Court, by paying careful attention to text, and a sense of historical connections.

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Words from Scalia that form part of his legacy- on democratic self-government as the development of the millenium. It "assumes a continuing appreciation of the need for structural checks," says Scalia. Essential to democratic self-government says Scalia is "what our Framers would have called a liberal disposition on the part of the people: a reluctance to impose their views by law in the face of significant opposition, a reticence to require others to love all that they love and to hate all that they hate." For Scalia that meant " a spirit of liberty" that is never too sure of being right and seeking to understand the thinking of other men and women.

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A critical part of the Affordable Care Act is the setup of marketplaces or exchanges to let people without insurance buy individual health plans. Some states setup their own exchanges, and some states let the federal government step in and run them. To help the lower middle class and poor the Act provides health subsidies to buy insurance in the exchanges, and 85% of customers in the exchanges qualify for this benefit. The U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 in 2015, compared to a tight vote in 2012 on the Affordable Care Act, to maintain the health subsidies. Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, saying "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them." Justice Scalia dissented calling it "interpretive jiggery-pokery." Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. dissented. Voting in favor were Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Justice Kennedy dissented in the 2000 case. The challengers petition to the courts was based on a reading of phrases in the Affordable Act which had not occurred to the writers of the law. The reading suggests only people enrolled in state setup exchanges are eligible for subsidies. If the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs the 6.4 million Americans who are enrolled in the federal exchanges would lose the subsidies provided under the law and lose health insurance. And the economic foundations of the Affordable Act would be undermined with insurance companies required to provide insurance to all regardless of pre-existing conditions and subsidies removed, leaving the companies with sicker pool of customers resulting in destabilizing the exchanges and higher premiums. The court ruled in favor of an interpretation that is compatible with the whole law and the intentions of the statute to help the middle class and the poor buy health insurance. The chaos in the insurance markets that would result in going with the plaintiffs because of a careless writing of a phrase, was uppermost in the majority's mind. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized this, saying- "The statutory scheme compels us to reject petitioners' interpretation, because it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any state with a federal exchange and likely create the very 'death spirals' that Congress designed the act to avoid." This case originated with 4 plaintiffs from Virginia who challenged the IRS regulation that said subsidies were allowed regardless of whether the exchanges were run by the state or the federal government, arguing that this was at odds with the particular phrase in the law that was ambiguous about federal exchanges eligibility for health subsidies. Judge Roger Gregory of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virgina, ruled that the phrase was indeed ambiguous, but the IRS was owed deference in its opinion. Chief Justice Roberts made it clear that this was not a case for the IRS, saying "it is instead our task to determine the correct reading." ...