Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has hired a full slate of law clerks through 2020 in a signal that she has no plans to leave her position.
Ginsburg, often affectionately referred to as the “Notorious RBG,” has served on the court for 25 years. And if President Donald Trump ― who once said Ginsburg’s “mind is shot” ― hoped for her to resign, it seems he’ll have to keep waiting.
Ginsburg’s new law clerk picks, announced last week, include Harvard Law graduates Susan Pelletier and Marco Basile, as well as Columbia Law graduate Alyssa Barnard and Stanford Law graduate Michael Qian. As Newsweek points out, justices who plan to retire typically don’t hire all of their clerks for the upcoming term.
Ginsburg has spent much of her career working on women’s rights cases. At an event for first-year law students at Georgetown University last September, she was asked why she centered her career around gender equality issues.
“You mean, how did I decide to become a flaming feminist litigator?” she responded.
She has previously said the 2016 presidential election was marred by sexism.
“The more women that are out there doing things and the more people see that women are not all alike, I mean we come in all sizes and shapes, that to me, to see the entrance of women into places where they were not there before, is a hopeful sign,” she said in a September 2017 interview.
Ginsburg has said she will stay in her position as long as her health holds. The 84-year-old has battled pancreatic cancer and won, and practices an intense workout regimen that includes doing pushups and lifting weights.