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Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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IRIN: And when the time comes, what would you like to be remembered for? RBG: Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. —MSNBC interview, 2015
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.” She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. “If you can say it in plain English, you should,” RBG says. Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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[I want to be remembered as] someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Supreme Court and Appalate Advocacy: Mastering Oral Argument (Practition Treatise Series))
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Law should be a literary profession,' RGB says, 'and the best legal practioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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My mother-in-law meant simply this,” RBG said. “Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability, and I really don’t think about whether I’m inspirational. I just do the best I can.” —RBG,
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men.
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Jeffrey Rosen (Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law)
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Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men. If Roe v. Wade had been based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution instead of on the Due Process Clause, Ginsburg insisted, it would have been more constitutionally convincing.
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Jeffrey Rosen (Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law)
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Not long before pop culture discovered RBG, liberal law professors and commentators began telling her the best thing she could do for what she cared about was to quit, so that President Barack Obama could appoint a successor. RBG, ardently devoted to her job, has mostly brushed that dirt off her shoulder. Her refusal to meekly shuffle off the stage has been another public, high-stakes act of defiance.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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Ruth, if you don’t want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you,” Morris said. “But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.
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Irin Carmon (Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg)