Justice & Law Quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

There’s steel in how ordinary this sounds. Ginsburg isn’t dressing the Supreme Court up as a temple of wisdom or a gladiatorial arena of ideology; she frames it as work. That word choice is the tell: a refusal to romanticize the institution, and a quiet rebuke to anyone treating it like a cable-news stage. “Had to” signals obligation over preference, a reminder that legitimacy isn’t a mood, it’s a practice. Even when the country is inflamed, even when the justices are being drafted into partisan narratives, the job remains: read, argue, decide, explain.

The context matters because Ginsburg lived through the modern Court’s celebrity era, when confirmation hearings became culture-war auditions and opinions got pre-digested into memes. Against that backdrop, “we did” lands like a clipped, almost prosecutorial closing statement. No self-pity, no confession of fragility, no invitation to applaud resilience. Just completion. The subtext is institutional discipline: the Court’s authority depends on the performance of steadiness, on the ritual continuing even when the room is tense.

It’s also a Ginsburg signature move: understate the drama while acknowledging its presence. By refusing to narrate crisis, she denies crisis the power to define the Court. The line is both reassurance and warning: the judiciary’s credibility is built less on lofty rhetoric than on the unglamorous insistence that the work gets done, and done in public, with reasons attached. That’s how a democracy’s seams hold.