BIG DRAW AT GLIMMERGLASS

Justice Ginsburg: Fear Not,

Constitution Getting Better

By JIM KEVLIN • for www.AllOTSEGO.com

COOPERSTOWN – Don’t despair, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reassured her fellow Americans in an almost full 914-seat Alice Busch Opera Theatre this afternoon:  Today’s dissents are often tomorrow’s majorities.

“Our Constitution has not changed, but our interpretation of it has become more perfect,” said the dean of the high court, an opera fan who has spoken to fellow fans at an annual fundraiser for five years now.  The 5-foot-1 jurist – arguably, she has now spent more time in Otsego County than any justice since Cooperstown’s Samuel Nelson – was greeted with a standing ovation, wild applause and cheers; the audience gave an encore at the end.

Ginsburg’s remarks on the Constitution came during a Q&A following a 90-minute “matinee” featuring nine opera selections that related to the law, ranging Bizet’s “Carmen” to Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” to “Stay, Frederic, Stay,” from “The Pirates of Penzance,” with observations by the justice in between.

The justice’s daughter-in-law, Patrice Michaels, performed three songs she had written based on Ginsburg’s experience – her nickname, “Bubbie” – as a woman lawyer and jurist.    Admitted as a young mother to Harvard Law School, her father-in-law advised her “no one will think the less of you” if she decided to stay home, Michaels reported, but if she chose to go forward, her assured her, “you will find a way.”

After Carmen “negotiated” her freedom by promising to dance for her captor, Don Jose, Ginsburg reported that today, 97.6 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of local felony offenders accept plea bargains rather than go to trial.

After Joseph “Dead Man Hanging” De Rocher’s confession, she reported there were only 28 executives in 2015, compared to 98 in 1999, and those were only in a few counties within six states.  Nineteen states have abolished the death penalty; 11 haven’t executed anyone in nine years, and the 2015 executions occurred in just nine states, she said.

During the Q&A, the justice, who earlier this year was criticized for calling Donald Trump “a faker,” and then acknowledged she had been “incautious,” was circumspect – but illuminative – in discussing current issues.

Asked which opera characters best represent her fellow justices, she stuck to characterizing her pal, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as someone who would have loved to perform any of the roles filled by his favorites, Pavorotti or Placido Domingo.   (The opera, “Scalia & Ginsburg,” will be performed at the Glimmerglass Festival next August.)

When asked for advice from a young female attorney, Ginsburg recounted that “the closed-door era,” when the law made distinctions based on race and gender, was brought to an end in the 1970s.  “What’s left is unconscious bias,” she said.   “Never snap back in anger,” she continued.  Treat “questions from people who don’t understand as an opportunity to teach.”

And she repeated advice from her mother-in-law, delivered on Day One, on how to have a happy marriage:  “Every now and then it helps to be a little deaf.”  She and husband Martin, who died in 2010, were married for more than a half-century.

Asked about how the high court’s equating corporations with persons, and the subsequent Citizens United, she noted that justices’ dissents later become majority opinions, citing Justices Holmes and Brandeis’ dissents to civil liberty crackdowns that followed World War I.  (She also called the Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court’s worst.)

Everything, she said, has evolved from the preamble of the Constitution: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.”  In 1787, she said, that didn’t include women, blacks or Indians.

“The genius of the Constitution over 200 years,” she continued, “is what constitutes ‘we the people’ has become ever-more expansive … Our Constitution has not changed.  But our interpretation of it becomes more perfect.”