2020年经济学人 美国最高法院大法官鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格(3)(在线收听

In her dissents she sometimes appealed to Congress to correct the law and occasionally, to her delight, it did. Her legal hero was an incrementalist: Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the court, who had laboured to dismantle segregation. Even when she was (as she operatically liked to say) a flaming feminist litigator, bringing cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s on behalf of the Women’s Rights Project at the aclu, she saw herself first as a teacher, instructing the all-male court how women felt about laws which “protected” and thus demeaned them.

在鲁斯的反对意见中,她有时会请求国会修正法律,而让她高兴的是,国会也偶尔修正了法律。她心目中的法律英雄是一位渐进主义者:瑟古德·马歇尔,最高法院第一位黑人大法官,他曾努力废除种族隔离制度。即使当她是(像她喜欢说的那样)一个激情四射的女权主义诉讼律师,在20世纪70年代代表美国公民自由联盟的妇女权利项目向最高法院提起诉讼时,她首先把自己看作是一名教师,向全是男性的法庭指示女性如何看待那些“保护”她们、进而削弱她们的法律。

She could have been furious about the prejudice she had faced herself, being Jewish as well as a woman: failing, for example, to get job offers from any New York law firm after leaving Columbia Law School, though she became the first tenured professor there. But she proceeded carefully, politely, case by case, and bad laws tumbled.

作为一个犹太人和一个女人,鲁斯可能会对自己面对的偏见感到愤怒:比如,她离开哥伦比亚大学法学院后,没有得到任何一家纽约律师事务所的工作邀请,尽管她成为了那里的第一位终身教授。但鲁斯小心翼翼地,有礼貌地,一个接一个地接着案件,坏的法律被推翻了。

When she joined the highest court her success rate fell, but her approach, as only the second woman there, was often the same: to explain to the male justices how it felt to be barred from the Virginia Military Institute or, as a teenage girl, to be strip-searched. Because the court just did not know these things. The role of women’s champion was too narrow, though.

当她加入最高法院的时候,她的成功率下降了,但作为那里的第二位女性,她的方法常常是一样的:向男法官解释被弗吉尼亚军事学院禁入,或者作为一个十几岁的女孩被脱衣搜身是什么感觉。因为法院根本不知道这些事情。不过,女人拥护者的角色太狭隘了。

  原文地址:http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/2020jjxr/514125.html