Most people don’t know that Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg were quite good friends. I researched for a couple of years into Scalia, his rulings, his dissents and who he was and what he truly Believed. I believe he was/is a very good man, placed in the position to counteract the forces behind Ginsburg. But he was a brilliant man that believed in free speech and debate and didn’t hold it against her. I hope it was the stories and rumors that went around last year. In honor of Justice Scalia a man I came to understand, love and admire on the anniversary of his death a few days from now, I post this article.
What made the friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg work
The answer is worth considering as partisan lines sharpen in the wake of Justice Scalia’s death. February 13, 2016
The question comes every time. “Excuse me, but there’s something I don’t understand about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” someone will ask my co-author and me at each event since we published “Notorious RBG,” a lighthearted biography of the justice. “How could she possibly be friends with Scalia?”
Now that Senate Republicans have vowed, mere hours after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, to block any Obama nominee to replace him, it’s worth considering the answer.
Nino and RBG, the court’s most famous odd couple friendship, the subject of the recent comic opera “Scalia/Ginsburg,” stood as an example of warmth and professionalism across traditional divides. For Ginsburg, who has been outnumbered throughout her career, it was also about making the institution work, no matter their disagreements.
Sure, the two justices, friends since the 1980s, had some things in common. They shared a love of opera. They came from outer-borough New York City. Before they were two of the nine, they were contemporaries as law professors and served together on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. But the reserved Clinton appointee and the bombastic Reagan pick had vastly different views on the constitution and the role of the court.
Had Scalia been a justice when Ginsburg was arguing women’s rights cases before the court throughout the 1970s, he certainly would have have voted against her. He wrote the solo dissent to her majority in U.S. v. Virginia, the opinion that ended women’s exclusion from the Virginia Military Institute, and formed the capstone of her lifelong fight for gender equality. “This is not the interpretation of a Constitution,” Scalia complained, “but the creation of one.” Scalia bitterly opposed the Supreme Court’s gradual recognition of rights for gays and lesbians; Ginsburg was the first justice to preside over a same-sex marriage. Scalia referred to the Voting Rights Act, the law protecting ballot access for the historically disenfranchised, as one of several “racial entitlements” that Congress would be hard-pressed to end; Ginsburg ferociously dissented when the court gutted it.
And yet. One former clerk told us Scalia was Ginsburg’s favored souvenir shopping buddy when they traveled together. On a trip to India, they famously rode an elephant, with Scalia sitting up front. What about feminism? “It had to do with the distribution of weight,” Ginsburg deadpanned slyly. They shared New Year’s Eves with their families and friends: “Scalia kills it and Marty [Ginsburg, Ruth’s husband] cooks it,” recalled one guest, former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson. “I never heard them talk about anything political or ideological, because there would be no point,” Ginsburg’s grandson, Paul Spera, told us. In 2010, when Chief Justice Roberts announced Marty’s death from the bench, Scalia wiped tears from his eyes
“If you can’t disagree ardently with your colleagues about some issues of law and yet personally still be friends, get another job, for Pete’s sake,” is how Scalia once described their lifetime appointments. “As annoyed as you might be about his zinging dissent, he’s so utterly charming, so amusing, so sometimes outrageous, you can’t help but say, ‘I’m glad that he’s my friend or he’s my colleague,’ ” Ginsburg said. Sometimes, she said, she had to pinch herself to not laugh in the courtroom when Scalia said something audacious.
Even in that VMI case, Ginsburg was grateful for how Scalia disagreed: giving her a copy of his dissent as soon as possible, so she could properly respond. “He absolutely ruined my weekend, but my opinion is ever so much better because of his stinging dissent,” she said.