Supreme Court justice speaks at Law Building rededication

By Mark Reutter

Law schools have been at the forefront of legal reform and social
change  throughout the 20th century, Supreme Court  Justice  Ruth
Bader Ginsburg said in a speech last Thursday on the UI campus.

Speaking  at  the rededication ceremony honoring the $12  million
renovation and expansion of the Law Building, Ginsburg said  that
law  professors  advanced  legal reform  after  World  War  I  by
establishing the American Law Institute, "an organization devoted
to systematizing, clarifying and reforming the law."

In the 1930s, Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of Howard
University's Law School, trained Thurgood Marshall and other
lawyers who eventually ended racial segregation through landmark
court cases.

Ginsburg herself was instrumental in organizing the Women's
Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was
credited with breaking down gender-based discrimination. After
serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington for 13 years,
she was appointed to the Supreme Court last year by President
Bill Clinton.

"My own work in the 1970s to help secure equal rights for women
and men relied on inquiries I pursued as a law teacher, ideas my
law faculty colleagues helped me formulate, and endeavors of
dedicated students who worked with me in litigation and on law
revision projects," she said.

Ginsburg received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the
university during the ceremony at the Krannert Center for the
Performing Arts. She was hooded by Deborah Jones Merritt, a
former Ginsberg law clerk who is now associate dean of the law
school, while another former Ginsberg law clerk, UI law professor
Stephen F. Ross, read the proclamation nominating her for the
degree.

Afterward, Ginsburg helped UI President Stanley O. Ikenberry,
Chancellor Michael Aiken, College of Law Dean Thomas M. Mengler
and Kenneth R. Boyle, chairman of the university board of
trustees, cut the ceremonial ribbon to rededicate the Law
Building.

The ribbon-cutting marked the end of a nine-year campaign to
update and expand the college's physical plant. Some 50,000
square feet of space was added to the original building, and the
auditorium and existing classrooms were completely remodeled.

The project was a joint effort by law school alumni, who raised
more than $6 million for the project, and the state of Illinois,
which provided a grant of $5 million to the college. Illinois
Gov. Jim Edgar attended the Krannert ceremony.

In her prepared remarks, Ginsburg said that while teaching law at
Rutgers Law School in 1970, students asked her to organize a
seminar on women and the law. "Gathering materials for that
seminar  prompted me to study, think and write about the stature
of women under the U.S. Constitution," she said. "That effort in
turn helped arm me for the Supreme Court litigation in which I
participated over the next decade."

Law students here have shown similar initiative, she said. "At
Illinois, students requested a course on Women and the Law. Your
colleague, John Nowak, answered the call. More recently, and with
equivalent public spirit, Illinois students worked with Professor
Richard Kaplan to publish the nation's first journal of Elder
Law, a publication that will advance the legal rights of the
elderly."

Ginsburg said she was pleased to follow in the footsteps of
former Chief Justice Earl Warren, who participated in the
dedication of the original UI Law Building in 1956. "Legal
education is a shared adventure for students, teachers and
alumni," she concluded. "May that adventure flourish in the
facility we dedicate this afternoon."