Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993 TAG: 9310050321
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
During the opening day of the Supreme Court's term, Ginsburg dominated. She was quick to question lawyers as they stood at the lectern, tearing apart their arguments, demanding evidence for their generalizations, grilling them on statutes.
"What is the proof of that?" the newest justice asked at one point. "Is there any support in the case law for this?" she asked later. "Why not?" she questioned an especially flustered lawyer, who, somewhat like Ginsburg, was involved in his first case at the court but, unlike Ginsburg, was suffering a major confidence crisis.
Gone was the tentative, measured cadence that America saw during Ginsburg's summer confirmation hearings. Her voice even seemed louder. Her queries ran from broad constitutional concerns of due process in one case to the minute details of voting rights law in two others.
Such outspokenness is rare among recent additions to the court. Justice David Souter, who was appointed in 1990, did not raise a question for weeks. Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined in 1991, asked his first question on day two but overall was quiet in his first and second year.
Souter since has become an outspoken questioner, sometimes rivaling Justice Antonin Scalia, the most vigorous participant in oral arguments. Ginsburg, Souter and Scalia now sit together - following an assigned pattern of alternating seniority - on the far right of the bench. And during Monday's arguments, the lawyers were riveted in that direction.
\ ALSO ON THE AGENDA\ IN OTHER MATTERS, THE HIGH COURT:
Rejected an appeal by officials seeking to bar students from forming a religion club and meeting for prayer and Bible study at a Renton, Wash., high school.
Cleared the way for a white supremacist's third trial in the 1963 murder in Mississippi of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The justices turned down Byron De La Beckwith's arguments that forcing him to stand trial again violates his rights.
Agreed to decide whether a Missouri town violated the free-speech rights of a woman who was told to remove a sign protesting the Persian Gulf war from her house's front window.
Refused to lift mass murderer John Wayne Gacy Jr.'s death sentences for the sex killings of 33 young men and boys in Illinois.
Refused to block a trial in which the Chicago Fire Department must defend its efforts to promote more blacks and Hispanics against a racial-bias challenge by white firefighters.
Turned away the appeal of a men-only Elks lodge in St. George, Utah, forced to let a woman become a member or give up its liquor license.
- Associated Press
by CNB