The Thammasat University Library has acquired some new books that should be useful for students interested in law, sociology, gender studies, history, political science, and related subjects: Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law and Decisions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Selection.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court inspired many students worldwide with her progressive views and advocacy.

The TU Library collection includes other books about Justice Ginsburg.

Professor Jeffrey Rosen of the Faculty of Law, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., the United States of America had friendly conversations with Justice Ginsburg for over 20 years.

Justice Ginsburg offers her private opinions about such issues as legalized abortion, the #MeToo movement, how to be a good listener, how to lead a productive and compassionate life, and the future of the US Supreme Court.

In an interview posted on his university website, Professor Rosen explained that Justice Ginsburg told him that with enough hard work, you can achieve your dreams. She said you really have to put in the time and discipline to achieve your dreams and through that, you can do whatever you set your mind to do.

Another valuable and thought-provoking new book in the TU Library collection is Decisions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

When a US Supreme Court justice decides a case with the majority of judges, the justice may write a decision; if the justice disagrees with the majority, a dissent or disagreement may be written. This book offers Justice Ginsburg’s most essential writings on gender equality and women’s rights, reproductive health care, and voting and civil rights.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was renowned for her staunch and unyielding defense of human rights. She also had an irrepressible passion for opera, although she often changed her mind about her personal favorites.

When asked what her favourite opera was, she would sometimes mention The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, both by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Yet she would also add that Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven gave her the most hope, with its story of a political prisoner freed by a virtuous wife.

Ginsburg considered Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods proof that a woman is needed to rescue mankind.

Another heroic female character in opera appreciated by Justice Ginsburg was Minnie, a bar owner in Giacomo Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West.

She also described a famous entrance aria sung by the star of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen as skillful plea bargaining, an agreement in criminal law proceedings, where the prosecutor provides a concession to the defendant in exchange for a plea of guilt or no contest.

For Ginsburg, a lifelong protector of minority groups, opera had lessons for society.

The first time she saw an opera was at age 11, She was taken by an aunt to see a version for children of Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda.

It was abridged and conducted by Dean Dixon, an African American maestro who was unable to find work in racist Americ. Dixon was subsequently obliged to seek a career in Europe.

Ginsburg’s personal fantasy role was the wife of a field marshal in Richard Strauss’ opera The Knight of the Rose, whose acceptance of renunciation and time’s passing struck an emotional chord.

Her favourite singers were Jussi Björling and Renata Tebaldi.

She thrilled to the 1961 double debuts of Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli in Verdi’s The Troubador at the Metropolitan Opera and was devastated when the baritone Leonard Warren died onstage on the same stage the previous year during a performance of Verdi’s The Power of Destiny.

Despite these experiences, in a 2006 lecture in Washington DC, Ginsburg admitted that law and lawyers mostly play trivial roles in opera: in Johann Strauss’s The Bat, for instance Dr Blind’s legal counsel is so ineffective, he manages to get for his client a few extra days in jail.

She added that

The lawyer who appears in [George Gershwin’s] Porgy and Bess ups the price to get Bess a divorce when she tells him she was never really married to any beau before Porgy.

Celebrated writers from Shakespeare to Sandburg have harbored a lingering distrust of the lawyers’ trade. Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, put it this way:

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle so distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

Sadly, many think of lawyers that way to this day.

But the legal profession has in its ranks legions of men and women striving to change that perception, jurists devoted to, and at work for, the public good – people who are the best of lawyers and judges, the most dedicated, the least selfish. This audience is filled with jurists of that kind, lawyers who are guided by Dr. Seuss’s gentle maxim: “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” and should receive the representation promised by the pledge of “Justice for All.”

It is generally not ideology that keeps lawyers from helping to repair tears in their communities, nation, and world, and in the lives of the poor, the forgotten, the people held back because they are members of disadvantaged or distrusted minorities. It is more likely to be apathy, selfishness, or anxiety that one is already overextended. Those are forces not easy to surmount. Yet lawyers who consider themselves not simply tradesmen working for a day’s pay, but members of a true and learned profession, will make the effort to overcome inertia, the workloads on their tables, and the shortness of the day, for the rewards are great. Lawyers fare best in their own estimation, and in the esteem of others, my life experiences teach, if they do their part to help move society to the place they would like it to be for the health and well-being of today’s children and of generations to come.

Yet love for opera could unite diametrically opposed people, as the collegial rapport between Ginsburg and a fellow Justice, Antonin Scalia, proved.

Going beyond mere political incorrectness, Scalia repeatedly derided the very idea of protecting minority rights.

Yet the two appeared onstage in a 1994 Washington National Opera (WNO) production of Ariadne auf Naxos and again in 2009 in a new WNO staging of the opera.

In 2015, the American composer Derrick Wang (a former law school student) created an opera, Scalia/Ginsburg inspired by the courtroom opinions of the two amicable adversaries. An excerpt may be heard on a CD from Cedille Records, a label founded by Ginsburg’s son James.

Ginsburg shared her passion for opera with other co-workers as well, in 2003 appearing onstage with fellow Justices Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy during the party scene in The Bat, again at Washington National Opera. She later stated that when Plácido Domingo sang two feet away from her, ‘it was like an electrical shock ran through me’.

In November 2016, Ginsburg again appeared onstage, delivering lines written by herself interpolated in Gaetano Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment at the Kennedy Center. Playing the Duchess of Krakenthorp, she offered a series of pointed observations as part of a list of requirements for suitors seeking to marry into her family.

To a legal mind that saw Wagner’s Ring as all about ‘breach of contract’, opera ultimately offered lessons about fidelity and tolerance, as well as sheer beauty.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)