Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a great rock star for the left, even packing thousands of fans into a stadium in Arkansas. Some have compared this phenomenon to the enthusiasm in some quarters for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But there is a world of difference between the two justices. Scalia revived a theory of jurisprudence—originalism—that had been dormant for over a half century. He wrote a book defending it. He was one of the great Supreme Court stylists. And he sometimes took positions in contested cases that political scientists coded as opposed to the conservative wing of the Republican party from which he came, showing that he was a judge and not a politician in robes.
In contrast, Ginsburg has become an icon without any of these distinctions. She is not a particularly gifted writer and has not previously articulated a comprehensive theory of constitutional interpretation. Unlike Justice Scalia and, for that matter, Justice Stephen Breyer, she has never written book defending her jurisprudential approach. And it is hard to think of any major case that substantially divided the justices where her vote failed to take the position political scientists would code as liberal. Of course, given the intellectual orthodoxy that dominates our universities today, it is not surprising this performance has nevertheless netted her an honorary degree from every Ivy League University except Cornell (and Cornell does not award honorary degrees) while Scalia was never once so honored. Just yesterday, after this review was initially drafted, she won the one million dollar Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, joining three previous winners who have combined to write scores of books.
Conversations with RBG, a set of interviews that Ginsburg held over the years with Jeffery Rosen, the President of the National Constitution Center, thus provides the opportunity to see whether something outside the public record other than raw ideology justifies intellectual elites’ disparate treatment of these justices. But it instead confirms that the prime reason for Ginsburg’s accolades is her relentless progressivism even as she lacks any new or compelling theory justifying that destination for constitutional law.
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