-I am, as you know, a Brooklynite, born and bred,
a first-generation American on my father's side,
barely second-generation on my mother's.
Neither of my parents had the means to attend to college.
What has become of me could happen only in America.
Like so many others, I owe so much to the entry
this nation afforded to people yearning to breathe free.
My law-school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500.
That class included less than 10 women.
I thought it could be a way to make a living,
plus to do something that would make conditions
in your society a little better.
-There was another student at Cornell.
-Yes.
-Who decided to become a lawyer, too.
-Yeah, my dear husband, yes. -Your dear husband.
-Yeah, in fact, we had decided that whatever we do,
we do it together.
Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid
for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree.
There were many well-known firms in New York
that were not yet up to welcoming Jews.
The next, I was a woman.
That was a higher barrier.
But the absolute killer was, I had a 4-year-old daughter.
So, when I graduated from law school,
there was not a single woman on any federal bench.
It would not be a realistic ambition for a woman
to want to become a federal judge.
Jimmy Carter became our president.
He looked around at the federal judiciary and said,
"I am determined to appoint members of minority groups
and women to the federal bench."
One of my law clerks at the Court of Appeals
said at the time that Clinton was considering
who would be his first nominee to the Court.
He said, "You will be on the list,
but you'll probably be around number 25."
I surely would not be in this room today
without the determined efforts of men and women
who kept dreams alive, people like Susan B Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman.
I stand on the shoulders of those brave people.
The court wasn't an unknown territory to me.
I mean, I've worked at the Court of Appeals.
I knew Justice Scalia from our Court of Appeals days together.
I knew Justice Clarence Thomas, who was also on the DC circuit.
But Sandra was as close as I came to having a big sister.
You now, the standard robe is made for a man,
because it has a place for the shirt to show and the tie.
So, Sandra Day O'Connor and I thought it would be appropriate
if we included as part of our robe
something typical of a woman.
When Sandra left,
it was a very lonely place for me to be.
There's eight rather well-fed men up there,
and then there was this small -- -Rather well-fed men.
-Small little woman.
It was the wrong perception.
In my lifetime, I expect to see three,
four, perhaps even more women on the high-court bench,
women not shaped from the same mold
but of different complexions.
People ask me sometimes,
"When will there be enough women on the court?"
and my answer is, "When there are nine."
Because I've been there so long, I sit next to the chief.
And to the left, some seats down,
is Justice Sotomayor, and to the right, Justice Kagan.
We're all over the bench.
We're 1/3 of the bench.
But there has been a tradition in the United States of dissents
becoming the law of the land.
You're writing for a future age, and your hope is that,
with time, the court will see it the way you do.
The Notorious RBG was started by a second-year student
at New York University Law School.
She was dismayed about the decision
the court had recently rendered, which she put on the Internet
the announcement I made from the bench
of my dissenting opinion in the Shelby County case.
And she called it the Notorious RBG
because she had in mind a well-known rapper,
the Notorious BIG.
I love my job.
It's the best and the hardest job that I ever had.
And it's what has kept me going through four cancer bouts.
Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains,
I just know that I have to read this set of briefs
and concentrate on the court's work.