Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes her office. The US Supreme Court justice, a spry 86-year-old who trains twice a week with an ex-Special Forces soldier, is a liberal icon on America’s highest court. A decade ago, she gave an interviewer a tour of her chambers, explaining: ‘I like a quiet place and I am glad to be overlooking the courtyard and not the front of the building, and so I’m not disturbed by demonstrators.’ Demonstrators are a hazard of the job for a court that is, when all the polite artifice is stripped away, a supreme legislature of nine. On sitting days, when the rawest of issues are being decided, the more excitable among the citizenry gather for a spirited discussion about which side has the greater predilection for infanticide. If nothing else, the placards are sometimes inventive.
The origins of America’s judicial wars are typically traced to the Court’s 1973 abortion decision in Roe v.
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