Law Office Management
Jan. 2, 2011
Justice Is Served
The night Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her distinguished tax attorney/professor husband came to dinner, which was prepared by (yikes!) me.
At the chime of the doorbell, the four of us all jumped up. After months of planning and preparing—and angsting and obsessing—the time had arrived: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her distinguished tax attorney/professor husband, Marty, were coming to dinner, prepared by (yikes!) me. Now, I'm not a chef by trade, just a small-town lawyer who likes to cook. And, yes, I was nervous. Not only was there the elaborate meal to prepare, but I also knew that they knew I was an attorney, and I was worried about coming across as a neophyte. Plus, my mother and my father, a UCLA constitutional law professor who's known the justice since the 1960s, hadn't seen the Ginsburgs for many years. Just don't say anything too stupid, I implored myself as I poured a round of champagne and took the empty seat between the justice and my partner, Robin. We started chatting about legal writing, and—don't ask me why—I mentioned that I had cowritten a Supreme Court brief several years earlier. "Oh, really? What issues were raised in the case?" Ruth asked. "Uh ... we were the respondents in a petition for cert," I answered slowly, trying to remember what the heck the brief had been about. "I think it involved preemption ... but to tell you the truth, I can't recall exactly what the issues were. I seem to be having a senior moment." As soon as the words were out, I wished them back. Here I was, some 20 years her junior, telling the justice I'm having a senior moment? Ouch. Abashed, I excused myself to go plate up the first course: seared sea scallops, set on a pool of ginger-lime cream sauce and garnished with lime zest and a tiny purple orchid from my mom's garden. As we sat down to eat, Marty announced that he was the cook in their family. "Ruth has not made a meal in 25 years," he informed us, and then he launched into a description of how the Ginsburg and Scalia families get together annually for an enormous New Year's Eve dinner cooked by him. "Nino goes down to Louisiana every year to kill Bambi," he recounted wryly. "And after they shoot the poor thing, he and his cohorts do a rough cut, then drag the bloody carcass back to D.C. for me to prepare for dinner. Last year I carved venison steaks from the loin for 19 people." Marty smiled broadly and took a self-satisfied swallow of wine. Our next course was roasted butternut squash soup, topped with a spiral of crème fraîche and bright orange nasturtium blossoms I had pilfered from a neighbor's yard. As we lifted our spoons, Robin asked Ruth about the time she had been a guest on the Metropolitan Opera's radio show in New York. "I remember you told a story about seeing Maria Callas," she prompted the justice. Ruth's eyes lit up. "Yes. That was the highlight of my life." She had gone to Washington, she told us, to argue a sex-discrimination case before the Supreme Court, and was waiting for the hotel elevator on her way to the courthouse. When the door opened, there stood La Divina, wearing a white mink coat and holding a white poodle in her arms. "And Callas has always been a great favorite of mine," Ruth said. "I thought to myself, it's a sign; I will surely win this case! And so it turned out." This was the 1970s, when then-professor Ginsburg won five of the six sex-discrimination cases she argued before the Supreme Court. Later, as a jurist, she continued her quest for equal protection of women, and in 1996 was rewarded with the Virginia Military Institute decision, in which the Court held VMI's exclusion of women to be unconstitutional. During the main course, my dad asked Ruth about the VMI case. "Nino sent his slings and arrows at the Chief that time," Ruth responded with a sly, cat-who-ate-the-canary smile. She took a bite of her blackened ahi, and then told us gleefully how Scalia, who normally sent his slings and arrows her way, was the lone dissenter in that decision. He had thus directed his ire at Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who had joined the majority in a concurring opinion. On this issue—the one closest to her heart—she had won a decisive victory, with Scalia the sole holdout. I grinned as Ruth chuckled and took a sip of wine. Yes, she had earned the right to wear that sly smile. Leslie Karst, a recently retired research and appellate attorney in Santa Cruz, is working on a memoir titled Cooking for Ruth. She dedicates this column to Martin D. Ginsburg (1932 – 2010).
Kari Santos
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