As a young prosecutor right out of law school at the Alameda County DA’s office that Earl Warren once led, I started my work.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s called ‚Scalia/Ginsburg.‘ The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.

She never envisioned a legal career for me, but she did think it was very important that I be able to support myself, and I think she would be pleased to see what has become of me.

I was the first tenured woman at Columbia. That was 1972; every law school was looking for its woman. Why? Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was enforcing the Nixon government contract program.

If you just needed the skills to pass the bar, two years would be enough. But if you think of law as a learned profession, then a third year is an opportunity for, on the one hand, public service and practice experience, but on the other, also to take courses that round out the law that you didn’t have time to do.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately – I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn’t a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn’t be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn’t realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.

My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.