On six occasions, she appeared before the Court to present oral argument. She lost just one case. Through her briefs, starting with Reed, she, more than any other lawyer, shaped the legal arguments reflected in the Court’s opinions, earning her the honorific “the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s movement.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: The Legislature can make the change, can facilitate the change, as laws like the Family Medical Leave Act do. But it’s not something a court can decree. A court can’t tell the man, You’ve got to do more than carry out the garbage.

Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, "My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way." But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would, would take. I think the answer to that problem is in Congress' lap. People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say "we want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else."

Twenty-one months after her admission, Lockwood became the first woman to participate in oral argument at the Court. She next and last argued before the Court in 1906. She was then seventy-five. Using the skill she had gained over a thirty-year span in her specialty — pressing money claims against the United States — she helped to secure a five-million-dollar award for Eastern Cherokee Indians whose ancestral lands had been taken from them without just compensation.

Overall, the Court's Roe position is weakened, I believe, by the opinion's concentration on a medically approved autonomy idea, to the exclusion of a constitutionally based sex-equality perspective. I understand the view that for political reasons the reproductive autonomy controversy should be isolated from the general debate on equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities for women and men.

district court, Kirstein v. University of Virginia,20 may well mark the turning point in the long effort to place equal opportunity for women under the aegis of the Federal Constitution.21 The court held inconsonant with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause the exclusion of women from the University of Virginia’s undergraduate school at Charlottesville; it approved a plan which, after a two-year transition period, requires the admission of women on precisely the same basis as men. Although sixteen years have elapsed since Brown v. Board of Education,22 Kirstein v. University of Virginia is the first decision to declare unconstitutional exclusion of women from educational opportunities afforded to men by a state institution.23 Significantly, “private” institutions of higher learning that might escape a constitutional prod confined to “state action” are beginning to volunteer similar reforms. For example, Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences announced during the 1969–70 academic year that it would admit women on the same basis as men and would offer students of both sexes the same options with respect to housing accommodations

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.