Justice Ginsburg

California Lawyer (November 2011) has an excellent interview with Justice Ruth Ginsburg.  Below is my favorite part: 

Q. I'd like you to talk a little bit about the cases that I've spent my life studying, the key gender cases that began in the 1970s, which you litigated and wrote amici briefs for. The 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, had been settled interpretation for, I think, 104 years. What made you think that you could get the courts to overrule more than a century of precedent?

A: The times. The Court is a reactive institution. It's never in the forefront of social change. When you think of Brown v. Board of Education, it was not only that Thurgood Marshall was a brilliant lawyer. It was the tenor of the times. We had just fought a war against an odious form of racism, and yet our troops through most of World War II were separated by race. Apartheid in America really had to go. Similarly, by 1970 the women's movement was revived, not just in the United States but all over the world. As a great legal scholar once said, the Court should never react to the weather of the day, but inevitably it will react to the climate of the era, and the climate was right for that change.

Perhaps, at least in a peaceful society, all good things come to those who wait?  I've always wondered whether the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of Muhammad Ali's status as a conscientious objector would be the same if the case had arrived at the Court a few years earlier.