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VIDEO: A Conversation With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Shuran Huang
/
NPR
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits for a portrait in the Lawyer's Lounge at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sat down for an interview with NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on topics ranging from her health to her career to the loss of her husband. 

The justice said despite battling cancer for a third time earlier this year, she's not going anywhere anytime soon. 

"There was a Senator," Ginsberg said. "I think it was after the pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator [late Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning] whose name I've forgotten is now himself dead. "And I am very much alive."

Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School at the top of her class in 1959, but she was well aware of the barriers to women. She "didn't think there was much to be done about it." She clerked for a U.S. District Court judge, but "no law firm in the city of New York" would "hire me," she said.

In the next video clip, she talks about her professional life and whether she has any regrets.

In the next clip, she talks about battling cancer for the third time, but this time without the support of her husband, Marty Ginsburg, who died in 2010.

"The work is really what saved me," she said.