To the London tour guide, she was just Ruthie. Sweet Ruthie. The man with the cockney accent had no clue he was addressing a pillar of American jurisprudence and an icon for gender equality as he dished up canned banter about monarchs being separated from their heads.
Lee H. Rosenthal said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delighted in that moment of anonymity on their 2015 tour of the palace where Charles I was executed. Rosenthal, the chief judge for the Southern District of Texas, is among a rare cadre in the region who knew the late Supreme Court justice or had encounters with her that shed light on her life and legacy.
Mourners will have a chance to pay their respects this week as Ginsburg lies in repose at the Supreme Court and becomes the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda Friday before she is laid to rest next week beside her late husband in a private burial at Arlington Cemetery.
Around Houston, people who crossed paths with the 5-foot-1 legal powerhouse recalled her as deliberative, discerning and wry.
Allan Van Fleet met Ginsburg in the 1970s at Columbia shortly after she’d been hired as the law school's first tenured female faculty member. Van Fleet, who’d spent the previous summer as a bartender in Lubbock, was thrilled to be invited to dinner with a few other students at their adviser’s off-campus apartment.
The lawyer, who has played a key role in two Harris County bail challenges, remembers the group of students being far more wowed at the prospect of hanging out with Ginsburg’s husband Martin, who was “this hotshot knocking down big bucks” as the best tax lawyer in the country.
When the crew arrived at Ginsburg’s “tastefully furnished” apartment, she introduced them to “Marty,” a tall man in the kitchen with an apron on.
“I don’t cook. Marty cooks,” she said. “You’re better off… You don’t want my cooking.”
Van Fleet later took Ginsburg’s constitutional law class, and perusing his notes this week he recalled being riveted by how she framed her lecture on the then-recent Roe v. Wade opinion. The champion of women’s rights and human rights was not preaching about the right to abortion, he said. Instead, she focused on how the ruling was rooted in the U.S. Constitution. She was showing them how to think like lawyers.
Susan Criss, a former state district judge in Galveston, rubbed shoulders with the justice several times through the National Association of Women Judges. One moment that sticks with her was in 2011 when Ginsburg was giving a keynote at Rutgers University, her former stomping ground as a law professor, and talked about the importance of dissents amid political pressure to prioritize national security in the years after the 9/11 attacks.
With the Patriot Act and detentions at Guantanamo on many people’s minds, Ginsburg spoke about having courage to preserve due process rights and protect privacy and judicial independence.
She spoke about the rush to treat people from other countries harshly, the right to fair trial and the importance of standing up to pressure to do what’s popular, Criss recalled.
The lecture was along the lines of, “We’re the gatekeepers. We’re where it stops. This is the rule of law, this is the constitution. This is where you have to be strong.”
For Criss it was eye opening. It was a surprise. At first she thought it was odd, since judges often need to find consensus. But over time, that lecture about dissents—like Ginsburg’s in the Ledbetter employment discrimination case— really gelled. Strong dissents have often provided the groundwork for new laws, she said.
Criss realized: “She could see the future.”
Attorney Dana Karni didn't get to know Ginsburg well, but the lecture she gave 23 years ago at Touro Law in New York gave her insight to the justice’s spiritual grounding.
Karni, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who helps people facing eviction, said Ginsburg talked about Emma Lazarus and Jewish justices who served before her. She touched on religion and family and why it was their duty to protect the oppressed. The most spiritual thing you can do is pursue justice, she said.
Carolyn Dineen King, an appeals judge on the 5th circuit since the late 70s, had been friendly with Ginsburg over the decades as they both served on the bench. She recalled Ginsburg as a discerning patron of the arts during a 2007 trip to Houston where the pair visited the chapel at the University of St. Thomas and the Rothko chapel.
Attorney Raffi Melkonian, who considers himself right of center politically, had his most high-profile legal victory in front of Ginsburg last year. The appellate lawyer saw in the justice a kindred spirit when it came to the wonky inner workings of civil procedure.
His opposing counsel on April 22, 2019, had fielded a barrage of pointed questions from Ginsburg during oral argument. But when Melkonian stepped to the podium for his first appearance before the vaunted tribunal, Ginsburg offered nothing but softballs.
He could see just the top half of the justice’s face from that vantage point, but he knew his technical arguments that a Fort Bend employee was fired for religious reasons had captured her full attention.
“I did feel a special link to her,” Melkonian said. “She lived and breathed these procedural rules. They were the core of her jurisprudence. Her approach to the law was based on detail and procedure and fairness, and she was an expert in those things.”
Although Ginsburg is well known for her early career as a pioneering civil lawyer, Melkonian noted that she gained her footing in that field when she co-authored a 1960s study on Swedish procedural law.
“She had a deep interest in the rules about what would qualify someone to get to court…the rules of the game,” he said. “She was very into that and she thought that making the rules fair would also give fair results.”
Three months later Melkonian read on his phone that Ginsburg had written the unanimous opinion in his client’s favor and “let out a very loud whoop” in the drop-off line at his son’s summer camp.
Jessica Revils, an Austin lawyer and Ginsburg superfan, also met the justice in the last years of her life. As a gay woman from a small town, Revils had read Ginsburg’s opinions in college and started researching her.
“This is the woman that changed everything for women and for men,” she said. “We have so many basic rights because of her time as a lawyer and as a Supreme Court justice.” She was moved by Ginsburg’s role in the 2015 marriage equality decision.
Revils named her red lab puppy Ginsburg. She would name her next dog in honor of the justice, Margot Ruth.
During her third year in law school, Revils learned that the real Ginsburg would be giving an overseas course for South Texas College of Law students. Revils donned her RBG T-shirt and went into the trip director’s office to make her case.
Ultimately, it was Ginsburg who wanted to meet Revils during the 2017 program in Malta. The law school dean had mentioned to her there was a student who’d named her dog Ginsburg.
Revils thanked the justice for “everything that you’ve done for me in my life” and handed her an envelope with a picture of her sleeping dog in a wig, glasses and a collar, side by side with a famous photograph of Ginsburg sleeping during the 2015 State of the Union.
It took Ginsburg quite a while to open the envelope. She took very long pauses between statements. “I think it’s because she is trying to find the perfect words to say the right thing,” Revils said.
“She loved it. She thought the dog was funny. She said, ‘It’s so big and I’m tiny.’”
gabrielle.banks@chron.com
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