Ginsburg Wants Another Woman at High Court

Among the many people calling on Barack Obama to name a woman to fill his first Supreme Court vacancy, one voice stands out: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the sole female on the nation's highest bench. In a frank interview with USA Today, the justice says that some of her male colleagues failed to understand the humiliation of the teenager who was strip-searched by Arizona school officials in a recent case. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," Ginsburg said.

Since the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg says, the tone has changed at the court's conferences—so much so that she sometimes feels ignored by her fellow justices—and she has been forced to fight lonely battles on cases from the strip-searched student to wage discrimination. But the "worst part" is the image of only one female on the bench: "Young women are going to think, 'Can I really aspire to that kind of post?" (More US Supreme Court stories.)