[inaudible conversations] >> good morning! [cheers and applause] i'm carla hayden, the librarian of congress, and i hope you all have been enjoying yourselves this morning. [cheers and applause] now, we have a rather large crowd this morning for this particular session.

and that's why i'm very thrilled to introduce our next program. for the past year at the library of congress -- you may sit down. [laughter] because i have a few more things -- [laughter] for the past year at the library of congress, we have been celebrating change makers. and i can think of few people who more than aptly fit that description than the united states supreme court justice ruth ruth bader ginsburg. [cheers and applause] >> okay, i'm going to hurry up. she is -- [laughter] a hero and an inspiration to so many of us. in fact, at four a.m. this morning students from american university were right over there -- [cheers and applause] camped out in front of this

facility, and they are here. she says -- and i said, justice, you know, i'm going to talk about your graduation from columbia law school and taught at rutgers and columbia, spent most of your career advocating for women's rights, all of these things, and you've been called recently the beyonce of jurisprudence -- [laughter] [cheers and applause] and the joke, i said, could i say that, and she said rather you say the jlo. [laughter] so without further ado, she is joined by her co-authors of her best selling memoir, "my own words," co-authors mary hartnet, georgetown law, wendy w. williams, a professor emeritus at georgetown law, and her

interviewer today and the interviewer, the person you know very well from npr, ms. nina totenberg. so -- [cheers and applause] the notorious rbg! [cheers and applause] >> please be seated. [applause] >> and i have to tell you before i leave the stage, i want to shake her hand. [cheers and applause]

>> well, i want to give her a hug, but that would be very unprofessional. so this is quite an amazing group, and i'm very admiring of all the people who have been on line for so many hours and waiting to see the justice. there's a lot to see even though she's a pretty little person. [laughter] so how about jlo? what was -- how did that happen? >> i was called about a month or so ago by jennifer lopez, and she said she would like to meet me and introduce her fiance e, alex rodriguez. [laughter] so they came to chambers, and we had a very nice visit.

she mostly wanted to ask if i had any secret about a happy marriage. but now a-rod is traveling with her to concerts all over the world. [laughter] >> so what was your secret to a happy marriage? did you pass on your mother-in-law's secrets? [laughter] >> on the day i was married, my mother-in-law -- i was married at her home. she took me aside and said she wanted to tell me what was the secret of a happy marriage. and i said i'd be glad to hear it, what is it? and she responded, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.

[laughter] and that's advice i have followed in every workplace -- [laughter] including the good job i now have. [laughter] so if an unkind word is said, you just tune out. [laughter] [applause] >> i was personally advised that instead of chairman mao, you listen to justice ruth. [laughter] justice ginsburg, we all know you have some health challenges in the last year, the last month. you had radiation the month of august, so let me ask you the question that everyone here wants to ask, which is how are you feeling, why are you here instead of resting up for the term --

[laughter] and are you planning on a staying in your current job? [laughter] >> how have i been? well, first, this audience can see that i am alive. [laughter] [cheers and applause] and i'm on my way to being very well. [applause] >> and why are you here instead of resting up for the term? [laughter] >> the term, we have more than a month yet to go, so i'll be prepared when the time comes. [cheers and applause] >> so how do you just keep trucking?

[laughter] >> for one thing, i love my job. it's the best and the hardest job that i ever had, and it's what -- it has kept me going through four cancer bouts. instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, i just know that i have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion, and so i have to somehow surmount whatever my, whatever is going on in my body. i concentrate on the court's work. >> so your book, "in my own words," it's the first, essentially, of two by mary hartnet and wendy williams and you in some -- in the first one

because it has a lot of your own words from the time you were in grammar school and writing for the school paper and opinion pieces as to your supreme court opinions. and then there's going to be a later authorized biography. these two ladies have been working on it for some time. so, mary hartnet, let me turn to you for a moment and is ask you about -- and ask you about the upcoming book. i hesitate to ask this, but i'm going to do it, because at least i have 4,000 witnesses. when. [laughter] >> can i just say preliminarily e that "my own words" was to be second. my official biography, mary and wendy have been at work how many years? >> fifteen years. >> fifteen years. >> 2004. >> and the idea is the book would come out, the biography would come out x it would be

followed the by the lectures and speeches that i've given on opinions i've written. but the years were going on and on, and then the it came to me that mary and wendy expected that i would be on the court for some time into the future. so they, to make the book complete, they wanted to wait, and i said, okay, let's flip the order. let's have my selected writings first and then the biography. >> and it was a marvelous idea. [laughter] >> so you still haven't said when. [laughter] that is my job, asking questions, you know. >> this justice keeps doing things, and we're very happy about that -- [laughter] [applause] and so it will be, the idea originally was that it would

break the story of justice ginsburg. it was before she was notorious. but now -- [laughter] it will be the complete, full story. and so we want to wait until we have that and, hopefully, it will not come out very soon. [laughter] [applause] >> well done, mary. >> i talked to you a little bit about the upcoming book. you won't tell me much, but i do know that there's a whole chapter about justice antonin scalia. justice ginsburg's great friend, sparring partner and entertainer, in some ways. [laughter] so tell me why there is a whole chapter about him and about your interview of him? >> sure. so there's also a whole chapter of him -- about him in "my own

words" including justice ginsburg's reminiscences about justice scalia. and everyone i think in this room knows about the unlikely friendship between the two. and interviewing justice scalia was a real treat for the book, and we interviewed him for the biography, but parts of that interview are in "my own words." and as they are so different in so many ways, going into his chambers is very different. justice ginsburg's chambers are light, airy, modern art, dozens or hundreds of pictures of friends, family, colleagues. and going into justice scalia's chambers, dark, leathery. there's a big dead animal looking down on you -- [laughter] so as i sat there interviewing justice scalia, i watched how he went from the kind of tough jurist that we all know, and his

face just softened and lightened up as he talked about his good friend ruth. and he told several stories. one was when they traveled to india together, and they went to visit the taj mahal. and justice scalia described how he watched justice ginsburg listen to the tour guide describe the love story behind the building of the taj mahal, and he said he saw tears start to stream from her eyes. and as he told me that, i'm 98% sure i saw a tear not related to an opinion or a dissent come out of his eye. [laughter] and the other story that he likes to talk about was parasailing. justice ginsburg, as -- when she was a young 70-year-old, was in nice for a legal exchange and was standing in the hotel looking out at the water and saw

all these people parasailing s. and she turned to her husband marty and said, marty, that looks like fun, we should do that. [laughter] ty looked hour -- marty looked horrified and said, are you crazy? if you do that, i'll remember you to our grandchildren. [laughter] the host said i'll go parasailing with you, dean yellen, and his wife was equally horrified, and she said if there's an accident and they can only save one of you, it better not be you. [laughter] so they went parasailing. they had to adjust for weight because dean yellen was a normal sized human being -- [laughter] and there was justice ginsburg. and off they went, and they went up and down, up and down, flopped into the water. and wendy and i asked justice ginsburg about this experience a few years ago when we were interviewing her and said what was it like?

did you like it? and justice ginsburg said it was marvelous, glorious, and then she related it, of course, to a greek myth and said it was like icarus, but we didn't get too close to the sun. [laughter] >> the weight was also a problem when we took a ride on a very elegant elephant. there's a photograph of it. some of his friends asked why are you sitting on the back of the elephant? [laughter] and i explained it had to do with the distribution of weight. [laughter] >> justice ginsburg, you've always been a rather determined person. when you were in law school, your husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. doctors told you his chances of survival were extremely slim,

but the two of you just carried on. and, as we all know, he survived. but i thought people here might be interested in what your days and nights were like in that year and how in some ways it set up your sleep patterns for life. >> yeah. it was my second year in law school, marty's third year, and there was massive surgery followed by massive radiation. there was no chemotherapy in those days. we just took each day as it came. my routine was ill attend my classes -- i would attend my classes. i had notetakers in all of marty's classes. i would then go to mass general, the hospital where he was, in the afternoons. and then when he was released

from the hospital and was having daily radiation, he was, first, very sick, and then he would sleep. until about midnight when whatever food he'd ingested that day, he would have not very good cooking -- [laughter] and then about 2:00 in the morning -- he was also dictating his senior papers to me. he went back to bed at about two in the morning, and that's when i hit the books myself. and in between there was our then-2-and-a-half-year-old daughter. so for weekes, many weeks, i was sleeping maybe two hours a night. and that's how i became a night person. i appreciated it in those early morning hours. the telephone didn't ring, there were no e-mails in those days.

it was a quiet time i could concentrate on the books. >> well, i hope you're getting more than two hours these days. i do know that if you want to call the ginsburg residence, you do not -- on a non, on a day, like a weekend day, you do not call before noon. >> not true on sitting days. >> not true on court days at all. [laughter] so today women, to some extent, take for granted their equality in the workplace, but that was not the case when you were a young lawyer. you couldn't get a job in a law firm, you had not one with, but two strikes against you. you were -- >> well, i was, first, a jew,

and there were many -- >> three strikes. >> -- well known firms in new york that were not yet up to welcoming jews. the next, i was a woman. that was a higher barrier. but the absolute killer was i had a 4-year-old daughter when i graduated from law school. >> you were a mother. >> so if they would take a chance on a woman, a mother was more than they were willing to risk. >> so you had top grades at harvard, and in your last year of law school when you moved to new york with your husband, you were tied for first place at columbia law school. and you're applying for clerkships. and tell us how you finally did get a clerkship, because nobody, by and large, would even interview you for the most part. >> yes. those were pre-title vii days. so employers were up front about

saying women are not welcome at this workplace, or we had a lady lawyer once, and she was dreadful. [laughter] so how many men have you had that didn't work out? [laughter] but i had a wonderful professor at columbia law school who later moved to stanford, jerry gunther. he was in charge of getting clerkships for columbia students, and he called every federal judge on the second circuit, in the southern, eastern districts of new york, and he was not meeting with success. so he called a columbia graduate, judge edmund palmieri, who was a columbia undergraduate, columbia law school graduate and always took his clerks from columbia.

and he said i strongly recommend that you engage ruth bader ginsburg. and palmieri's response was i've had women law clerks, i know they're okay, but she's a mother, and sometimes we have to work on weekends, even on a sunday. so professor gunther said give her a chance, and if she doesn't work out, a young man in her class who's going to a downtown firm will jump in and take over. so that was the carrot. it was also a stick, and the stick was if you don't give her a chance, i will never recommend another columbia graduate as your law clerk. [laughter] [applause]

and that's the way it was in not-so-ancient days for women. the big hurdle was to get that first job. once a woman got the job, she did it at least as well as the men. so the second job was not the same obstacle. there's a wonderful book -- this is a meeting about books, so let me mention it -- it's called "with firsts." and it's about, it's a biography of sandra day to conner. she was very -- sandra day o'connor. she was very high e in her class at stanford law school, but no law firm would hire her. she was asked do you type, and maybe there would be a place as a legal secretary.

so what did she do? she went to a county attorney and said i will work for you without pay for four months, and then if you think i'm worth it, you can put me on the payroll. that's how sandra day o'connor got her first job. >> but even after your clerkship, you couldn't get a job in a law firm. you ended up being a law professor. >> i could have gotten a job. in fact, i was going to a firm when a professor, another professor from columbia, al schmidt, said how would you like to write a book about the swedish judicial system? well -- >> this is a part of her life you will not hear generally discussed, so you're in on a question that normally doesn't come up.

>> anyway, this was an irresistible offer because here i was in my 20s, before i turned 30 i would have a book between hard covers. marty and i married the same month i graduated from cornell, so i had never lived on my own. i went from a college dormitory to being married, and i had what might be called the eight-year itch. [laughter] i wanted to see if i could manage on my e own. and the deal was i would go to sweden. my daughter jane would be taken care of by her father for about six weeks, and when she finished school, she a came and joined me in sweden. and i got that out of my system.

i never again yearned to live on my own. [laughter] oh, and then there was the opportunity to learn about a culture and to learn a language that i knew nothing at all about. >> wendy, one of you, did you go back to -- did you go to sweden with her? >> i did. >> mary, you -- she went back to sweden this year. >> this year. >> it was the 50th anniversary of my honorary degree from the university. >> and you saw there -- what did you see on the street? your picture. >> yes. [laughter] >> there were posters up and down the streets of one of the many, many -- [inaudible] that the justice did in sweden. we kept trying to see the posters. the car was zooming through the

streets, and it was like that scene in the movie "french kiss" where they never see the eiffel tower? we kept looking and looking, and finally driving to the airport, remember? we turned and there it was. >> wendy, you've been working on this book for 15 years with mary. did you interview all of the justices she served with? how often did you interview her? what do you do when you have 15 plus years? what is your agenda? >> wendy, before you answer, let me tell you how -- [laughter] all this began. >> you're not going to get -- >> wendy and mary came to see me, and they said inevitably people are going to write about your life. so why don't you make it your official biography, people you really trust.

and i certainly trusted wendy and i were in the trenches in the '70s when for the first time in history it became possible for courts to accept, the equal protection clause meant that women were people, equal in stature to men. [applause] so i knew wendy's strategy and mine were pretty much the same. i knew that she understood what we were trying to accomplish. so i said yes without hesitation. >> in fact, when we, when we came to her to talk about it, she sat us down at a little table. and on the table, there was a stack of documents and opinions and other things about this high, and she said, oh, here's a little something that you might want to look at.

[laughter] that's how we knew we were in, so to speak. [laughter] >> so did you, in fact, interview all of the justices she's served with? >> i did not interview any of the justices that she served with, but mary did. >> between the two of you, you interviewed them all. >> we did. >> actually, not all of them -- >> some of them refused to be interviewed. >> well, and there are some newer additions we still plan to interview. but most of them. >> and how often did you sit down with her for an extended interview? i'm assuming it's a lot. >> well, it's a lot. we started out in that little moment in time after she was done with her summer and just before she had to knuckle down and prepare for the coming term, and every year in august -- most

often in the last week -- we sit down with her for three days in a row in the late afternoons. so we have our own big stack from that. and she -- and this year it was a little different. we went up to new york where she was getting her radiation treatments, and it was amazing. how could you -- anyway, so we sat with her twice up there, and she, she remembered everything. she was perfectly normal except she was very tired, which she has never let stop her, and she wasn't letting it stop her then. and that was, and that was, that was a new experience for us in new york. but then we came back down for one day, day before yesterday, and did our third day. so every year we do that. and then we do a lot of things in between to keep track of her.

[laughter] >> so let me just say this to do you two here in front of god and everybody. justice brennan famously had an authorized biographer who got writers' block after he died, and somebody else eventually had to take over the project. >> yes. and i'm getting old, is that what you're saying? [laughter] >> i'm saying to you, you better not get writers' block. we all want to see that. [laughter] everybody here, some of whom are a great deal younger than me, want to be able to read the product of your labor. >> well, we do too. [laughter] [applause] >> you know, i'm taking for granted, this is a very educated and curious audience. i'm taking for granted that everybody in this room has seen rbg at least once -- [applause] and on the basis, and on the basis of sex. so i'm not going to go through

all of the cases and the strategy and all of that of justice ginsburg, because there are other places where you've seen this, but there are also a lot of young people in this audience, men and women. and i wanted to ask justice ginsburg in light of that and in light of all of the conversation that we have these days about a balance between work and family life, could you tell us the story of the elevator piece? [laughter] >> the elevator thief was my lively son. it was when he was in the sixth grade. i called him riley, his teachers called him hyperactive. [laughter] lively. and i would get calls about once every month to come down to the

school to talk about my son's late escapades. one day i was sitting in my office at columbia law school, the phone rang. it was the headmaster, we need to see you immediately. now, i've been particularly weary that day because i had stayed up all night writing a brief. so i said this child has two parents -- [laughter] please alternate calls, and it's his father's turn. [cheers and applause] so they called marty who had been the head of the tack department at a -- tax department at a large law firm. he came down and was told your son stole the elevator. [laughter] and marty's immediate response was, he stole the elevator?

how far could he take it? [laughter] so i don't know if it was marty's sense of humor -- and, by the way, the theft was it was one of those old-fashioned hand held elevators? the operator went out for a smoke, one of james' classmates challenged him to take the kindergarten class up to top floor. [laughter] >> which he did. [laughter] >> so after that episode, the calls came barely once a semester. [laughter] there was no quick change if my son's behavior -- in my son's behavior, but the school was much more reluctant to take a father away from his work than a mother. so the suggestion to alternate calls did the trick.

[laughter] [applause] >> so i want to -- >> let me just add that that son is today a fine human -- [laughter] >> he's not in prison anywhere. >> he's a great parent to the two girls. >> and because she won't do it, i will. he has -- he runs a thing called sedilla records, and they produce magnificent classical recordings. okay, that's my -- that would be inappropriate for you to do but not me. [laughter] so let's talk about your time on the supreme court. you were appointed by president clinton, and within three years of getting to the supreme court, you were still a very junior justice, you're assigned to write the virginia military

institute case striking down their policy of exclusion of women. and you would not have gotten that assignment but for your female colleague, justice o'connor, right? >> yes. seniority is very big in our workplace, so justice o'connor wouldn't have been way ahead of me as a chosen opinion writer. but sandra said ruth could write e this opinion. so it's thanks to justice o'connor that i got to write the decision in the virginia military institute case. >> so you wrote in that case that most, most women -- indeed, most men -- would probably not want to meet the demands, the

rigorous demands of the portfolio -- m.i., but those extraordinary individuals who can meet those demands and want to meet those demands should be permitted to. so you were invited to vmi a little over a year ago, i think, to give a speech. how did that go? >> in fact, they had invited me to come toll vmi at the 20th -- to come to vmi at the 20th anniversary of the decision. my calendar was too crowded, so it turned out to be the 21st anniversary. and you were with me -- >> yes. >> -- for that. the change in that school has been enormous. the commanding officer was so proud of his women cadets. they live in the same quarters that the men live in, but they

were so enthusiastic. many of them were in the engineering program. one wanted to be an atomic scientist. the school, by admitting women, they were able to upgrade their applicant pool considerably -- [laughter] [applause] >> wendy, what did she leave out? >> >> well, she left out a ginsburg/scalia moment. to begin with. because justice scalia found her opinion fairly outrageous, and he was very upset about the whole thing. and his last sentence of his opinion said something like this is going to destroy vmi.

he used the word "destroy." and i asked justice ginsburg about that later, and she said to me with perfect -- this was not so long after the opinion, i think. she said to me with the utmost confidence, vmi will be a better place if there are women. and it won't be destroyed, and the wonderful thing about that was when we were there for the 21st anniversary, people there were so proud and excited to have you in person come there after you had transfigured the place. there was an audience almost as big as this, and back there there were what do you call them -- >> bleachers. >> bleachers, bleachers.

all the cadets were there in their uniforms, and for ruth ginsburg they all stood up and applauded. it was just remarkable. [applause] >> as it turned out, justice is scalia was the sole dissenter in the vmi case. >> yes. [laughter] >> justice rehnquist didn't join my opinion, but he did join the judgment. justice thomas was recused because his son attended vmi. >> he couldn't participate. >> so that left scalia all alone. [laughter] justice scalia knew i felt deeply about the case, as he did the other way, and he came to my chambers one day, took out a sheaf of papers and said, ruth,

this is the penultimate draft of my dissent in the vmi case. i'm not yet ready to circulate to the court, but the clock was ticking, and he wanted to give me as much time as he could to answer husband rather strident dissent. [laughter] >> you were going to the second circuit meeting -- >> yes. i was going to the judicial conference in lake george. i was on the plane, opened up his dissent. it absolutely ruined my weekend -- [laughter] but i was certainly glad to have the extra time to respond. >> so talking about vmi reminds me that when you get to the court, justice o'connor, of course, was the first woman justice. she's there, she's been there for quite a while -- >> twelve years.

>> -- by herself. and as you would later learn, that's no fun, because you had to be the only one for a while too. and, you know, she was a reagan appointee, she was a girl of the west. you were a clinton appointee, you were from new york city, and i wondered -- you very quickly, though, established a very special bond. >> she was as close as i came to having a big sister. when i came onboard, she gave me some advice, not too much. she didn't want to douse me with excessive information. just what i needed to know to navigate those first few weeks. and then she was an enormous help in my first cancer bout with. justice o'connor had a

mastectomy and was on the bench nine days after her surgery. so she was going to tell me how to manage this. she said you schedule chemotherapy for friday, that way you can get over it during the weekend and be back in court on monday. and she also said you're going to get, in those days they were not yet e-mails, but you're going to get calls, you're going to get letters from all over. don't even try to respond. just concentrate on getting the court's work done. >> i'm not telling secrets here when i say that in many of the court's biggest cases of late you are -- not all, but you are in the minority, on the dissenting side. but, you know, in the last five years or more you have pulled

out some unexpected victories. and i'm thinking, for instance, of the court's 2015 decision upholding arizona's redistricting commission. these were created by state referenda by the voters to limit partisanship in the drawing of legislative districts in the state. and will you tell the audience what your opinion said? >> what the opinion said? >> >> the opinion said. you upheld them. why? >> because something needed to be done about the partisan gerrymander -- [applause] i think california was in the lead, then arizona, the good voters of arizona were tired of drawing district lines when

there was very little incentive to vote because your districts had been rigged. it was going to be a republican seat or a democratic seat. so your vote didn't count. that's not the way a democracy should run. [applause] so arizona and california had the idea, and this is not done by the state legislature. state legislatures would not willingly give up the monopoly they had on redistricting. so the good people of the state said this should be done, the redistricting should be done by an independent commission, not by partisan members of the legislature. it presented a constitutional question because the constitution says redistricting will be done by the legislature thereof. so some of my colleagues said legislature means legislature,

and it doesn't mean the people. to me, it seemed quite clear that the state had made the people the legislature for this purpose. they should have referenda do that. they gave the deciding voice to people, to we, the people, and not the partisan members of the legislate can church and i think -- legislature. and i think that after that case other states were encouraged, other states that had referenda. >> so the dissent in that case was written by chief justice roberts, and he argued very vigorously that the legislature means only the legislature. now, fast forward to this year, a 5-4 conservative majority ruled, essentially, that the voters have no ability to challenge extreme partisan gerrymandering in court. but at the same time, the

opinion -- written, this time majority opinion written by the chief justice -- seemed to suggest that other remedies like independent redistricting commissions provide they were ways to address -- alternative ways to address the problem of partisanship in redistricting. so could you please explain what's going on here? [laughter] have the court's conservatives changed their minds about redistricting? is it just window dressing or what? >> as one lives, one learns. so i think the chief learned that he was wrong in the arizona -- [laughter] [applause] >> so i want you to look at this crowd. they tell me this is 4,000 people, i'm not quite sure. next week you and i are going to

another interview in little rock, arkansas, in a venue that holds 18,000 people. and not only are all the tickets gone, there's a waiting list of 16,000 people. [applause] so, my dear notorious rbg, how does it feel to be a cultural and pop icon in your 80s? [cheers and applause] >> it's amazing. [laughter] at the advanced age of 86, everyone wants to take a picture

with me. [laughter] the notorious rbg was started by a second-year student at new york university law school. she was displayed about a decision the court had recently rendered in shelby county case that held the key provision of the voting rights act of 1965 unconstitutional. then she thought to herself, i'm angry about that. but anger will not get me any place, so i'm going to do something positive. the positive thing that she did was she put on the internet x can it's tumbler? [laughter] announced it from the the bench

in my dissenting opinion in the shelby county case, and she called it the notorious rbg because she had in mind a well known rapper, the notorious b.i.g -- [laughter] and people ask me, what in the world do you have in common with the notorious be. b.i.g.? [laughter] uh-uh e said, it's evident. [laughter] [applause] we were both born and bred in brooklyn, new york. [laughter] [cheers and applause] >> by the way, when you and justice o'connor were on the court, even at the end of her tenure, some very seasoned supreme court advocates, not newbies -- really seasoned

people -- kept confusing you. [laughter] they would call you justice to conner and her justice ginsburg and, excuse me, you don't look anything alike. [laughter] she had at least 6 inches on you. [laughter] her hair style was different, her accent was -- everything was different. why? >> for 12 years sandra day o'connor was the lone woman on the supreme court. and advocates were accustomedded to there -- accustomed to there being a woman on the court. her name was sandra day o'connor, so if they heard a woman's voice, it had to be justice o'connor. [laughter] she would come out and say, i am justice o'connor, she's justice ginsburg. that happened not just occasion al a lawyers who showed up, but even the solicitor

general -- [laughter] mortified as soon as he called me justice o'connor and realized the mistake that he had made. >> he said he wanted, he had -- wished that there was a trap door under his feet. [laughter] .. ask justice kagan on the other. people who have behind ad arguments at the court know that my two sisters in law are not shrinking violets. they're very active and there

was a rivalry between justice scalia and justice sotomayor who could ask the most questions. >> several times she won. so it seems to me appropriate since we began this interview talking about justice scalia, we should end it in some way there, because the two of you were such pals for so many decades and such unlikely -- such an unlikely friendship. to people from the outside. what dead you love about him so much? >> he was a very funny man. he had been buddies on the d.c. circuit for some years before he was appointed to at the supreme court, and that was a three-judge bench. sometimes he would whisper something to me that was so funny, i had everything i could do to contain myself from bursting out into hysterical

rafter and the supreme court, while we didn't sit next to each other, he would sometimes send me notes. i can't reveal for the audience what some of them were, but -- [laughter] -- and there's a comic opera called scalia-ginsburg that characterizes the two of us, the different way we approach reading legal text, but our reverence for the court as an institution and for our constitution, so to leave you with just a small sample of this very amusing opera. scalia's open, aria is a rage are aria and guess like this, the justices lined how can they possibly spout this, the

constitution says, absolutely nothing about this. and then i answer him, dear justice school you're your searching for brightline solutions. the problems that don't have easy answers. but the great thing about our constitution is that society it can evolve. the -- [applause] >> so the plot is roughly based on the magic flute. justice scalia is lock up in a dark room, being punished for excessive dissenting. [laughter] and i enter the cashing room through a glass ceiling -- [laughter]

[applause] -- and say i'm there to help him pass the test he needs to pass to get out of the dark room. and a character called the commentery says, why would you want to help him? he is your enemy. and i explain, he is not my enemy. he is my dear friend. and then we sing a wonderful duet foes like this: we are different, we are one. different in our approach to legal text, but one in our reverence nor institution we search and for the united states constitution. [applause] >> so, i know this seems like a very short time, but we have

already exceeded it. and i thank the justice, her biographers, all the people here who waited so long to come, this has been a lovely morning. thank you justice ginsburg. [applause] [cheers and applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. [cheers and applause] testify

national book festival and another call-in opportunity with author sharon robinson. her book, child of a dream, enemy more of 1963. miss robinson, where were you living living and what was life like. >> we were living in stand -- stanford, connection and a house on six acres and a lake and rounds by woods so we had the privacy my parents were seeking. it was in a predominantly white community in northern stanford. so integrated our neighborhood and our school. >> i did want to ask that question. how many black people were living in