2020年经济学人 美国最高法院大法官鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格(1)（在线收听）

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal conscience of America’s Supreme Court, died on September 18th, aged 87

美国最高法院的自由派良知鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格于9月18日逝世，享年87岁。

On the evening of July 11th 2015, Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera. There was nothing odd in that. Opera, after the law, was her great love, the only place where she could leave the legal world behind. When she worked on her opinions, often into the small hours if her husband Marty was not around to make her go to bed, she would usually have opera, or some other beautiful music, playing in the background.

2015年7月11日晚，鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格去看歌剧。这没什么奇怪的。在法律之后，歌剧是她最大的爱好，是她唯一可以把法律世界抛在身后的地方。在为自己的观点而努力时，鲁斯经常工作到凌晨，如果她的丈夫马蒂不在旁边哄她睡觉，她通常会用歌剧或其他美妙的音乐作为背景音乐。

The talent she most coveted was to have a glorious voice, like Renata Tebaldi perhaps. As it was, she sang only in the shower and in her dreams. This particular opera, however, “Scalia/Ginsburg”, by Derrick Wang, was about her. It featured Antonin Scalia, then the court’s most scathing conservative, and she, its most notorious liberal, duelling musically in the styles of Mozart, Verdi and Puccini. He had to go through various trials; she helped him out, at one point soaring through a glass ceiling in the character of the Queen of the Night from “The Magic Flute”. She loved it all. She and Scalia, despite the legal zingers he tossed in her direction, had been best buddies since their days together on the dc federal appeals court in the 1980s.

她最渴望的才能是拥有一副美妙的嗓音，也许就像雷娜塔·蒂波迪那样。事实上，鲁斯只在淋浴时和梦中唱歌。然而，德里克·王的歌剧《斯卡利亚/金斯伯格》就是关于她的。它的主角是安东宁·斯卡利亚，当时最高法院最严厉的保守派，而她，这个最臭名昭著的自由主义者，在音乐上以莫扎特、威尔第和普契尼的风格奋战。他必须经历各种审判；鲁斯则帮他走出困境，在《魔笛》中，她凭借饰演“夜女王”一角曾一度冲破玻璃天花板。鲁斯都喜欢。尽管斯卡利亚对她说了一些法律上有力的反驳，但她和斯卡利亚自上世纪80年代在特区联邦上诉法院一起工作以来就是最好的朋友。

And America’s highest court could be just as dramatic, even if more sombrely arrayed. There she sat, this tiny little woman perched among the black-robed men, and there she disagreed. For all but three of her 27 years she had one or two sisterly colleagues, but her opinions still marked her out. She berated the court when, in 2014, it let employers foist their religious beliefs on their workers by not paying for cover for contraception. She was outraged when, in the Citizens United case of 2010, it refused to limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts, as if America had all the democracy that money could buy.

而美国最高法院也可能同样引人注目，尽管其排列更为庄重。鲁斯坐在那里，这个瘦小的女人坐在一群黑袍男人中间，持反对意见。在她27年的职业生涯中，除了3年之外，她都有一两个姐妹同事，但她的观点仍然让她脱颖而出。2014年，法院允许雇主通过不覆盖避孕费用的方式，将自己的宗教信仰强加给员工，鲁斯对此大加斥责。在2010年的联合公民案中，法院拒绝限制公司对独立政治广播的资助，就好像美国拥有金钱所能买到的一切民主一样。鲁斯对此极其愤怒。