Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in an engaging and spirited 90-minute conversation at U-M’s Hill Auditorium on February 6, during which she spoke about milestones in her own life, as well as key moments in the legal history of the past several decades.
She also paid a visit later that day to a joint class of students currently studying constitutional law with Professors Kate Andrias, Daniel Halberstam, and Richard Primus.
She was the fifth Supreme Court justice to visit the Law School in recent years.
During the public event, the 2015 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, she talked about her dissent in the Citizens United case in which the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on campaign finance.
Ginsburg said that is the decision she would most want to see overturned. She also predicted that the pendulum would swing and that ‘there will come a time when people are disgusted” with the increasing influence of money in politics. ‘I like to think most of my dissents will be the law someday,” Ginsburg said.
The now-82-year-old justice also addressed the question of how long judges should serve. “As long as I can do the job at full steam, I will stay in it. But when I begin to slip, as I inevitably will…it will be the time to go,” she said during the talk, which was sponsored by the Law School and the U-M Philosophy Department.
