NATIONWIDE — David Goldberg was among the dozens of law clerks lining the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday as the casket holding the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived to lie in repose. Like the others alongside him, the 55-year-old constitutional litigator had once worked for the legendary equal rights pioneer. 

“On the steps, it was a very dramatic moment to just connect with the reality that she had died,” said Goldberg, who clerked for Ginsburg in the early ‘90s when she was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the year before President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court. 

As impactful as it was to stand on those hallowed, marble steps and pay tribute, it was his overnight shift holding vigil for the woman affectionately known as RBG that meant the most, he said.

“I felt like it was really part of my connection to her. For both of us, these were working hours, so it was nice to be there at 2:40 in the morning because I knew there were many times she was up at 2:40 doing that work, into her 80s.”

Goldberg knows because in the year they worked together, he sometimes delivered the bench memos he’d been tasked with writing for Ginsburg cases to her home, well after regular business hours. 

“She let it be known that she did a lot of her preparation after dinner,” Goldberg said, “and at some point, I asked whether I could take that extra time to finish up a project I was working on.”

She quickly agreed, he remembered, saying, to his great relief, that “all that mattered was that it was ready when she needed it, and it was good.”

More than once after that, in those pre-email days, he would hail a cab at the D.C. courthouse and physically deliver the document to the doorman at Ginsburg’s apartment building, who presumably had instructions to whisk it to her doorstep.

The future justice was “definitely not a morning person,” Goldberg explained, “but more important, she was not a conventional person. And she had a pretty high tolerance, even a special affection, for non-conformists. She was dedicated to excellence and rigor, but she recognized that there were different paths to getting there.”

Another way that Ginsburg “walked the walk,” Goldberg explained, was in her process for hiring law clerks. 

“Almost every judge and justice at that level has a cookie-cutter idea of what a ‘law clerk’ looks like – a 24-year-old editor of the Law Review at Harvard, Yale, or Columbia, with a pile of exuberant recommendation letters signed by big-name law professors.”

But Ginsburg was different, he said. “She had a much broader understanding of merit, surely informed by her own experience attending law school as the mother of an infant in the 1950s.”

One of his co-clerks during the year he worked for Ginsburg, Dori Bernstein, had already been out of law school a number of years, had a young child, and was working as a staff counsel for the court of appeals. It was an administrative job, but Ginsburg saw that “she was [and is] really brilliant,” Goldberg recounted. “She’s a great writer, and a pleasure to be around, and immediately thought, ‘Why wouldn’t I hire someone like that as my law clerk?’ She immediately offered her the job.”

That was another great thing about Ginsburg, he said: “She saw people as people, sometimes recognizing strengths they didn’t yet see in themselves, and she saw them – men and women – as parents and spouses and wanted them to live fulfilling lives. She wanted us to see that too. It was not the standard approach in the 1990s.”

Goldberg’s first experience with Ginsburg was as a child years earlier, when his family briefly lived in the same building in New York City. They met professionally after he had graduated from Harvard Law School when he interviewed to be her clerk. 

While Ginsburg is best known for her pioneering work advancing women’s equality, many of the cases she oversaw at the U.S. Court of Appeals were criminal.

“We were looking at cases where the sentences for somebody who had a minimal role in a drug deal was going to spend 25 years of his life in prison,” Goldberg said. While the judge “wasn’t ready to say that was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual,” he explained, she was “very sensitive to the human toll that inflicted.”

She wanted the law clerks to “take extraordinary care that those kind of sentences were really what the law demanded, and she wanted us to really understand, as we began our careers in various parts of the legal system, what was at stake at the human level,” he said.

Often, and quite unusually for an appellate judge, Ginsburg took her law clerks to Lorton, Virginia, to see the prison where many people sentenced in the D.C. Circuit Court were sent.

Ginsburg is revered for her many accomplishments concerning women’s rights, but it is her profound sense of humanity that has fostered enduring connections with the people with whom she closely worked.

“There is just this love and this intensity of feeling that law clerks often have for a judge they worked for, but with Ginsburg, it was a lifelong connection,” Goldberg said. 

Goldberg’s connection to Ginsburg inevitably brought him into contact with her husband, Marty. The Ginsburgs had agreed to have brunch with Goldberg and his co-clerks in June 1993, shortly before she would be asked to serve on the Supreme Court.

“But at that point, she was glum about how that process had gone. She did not seem to be under serious consideration, and she hadn’t gotten the support of people she had expected would be in her corner. It was a tender time,” Goldberg said.

At the brunch, he recalled Marty saying, “What I keep telling Ruth is that things like this are like the New York City subway. The doors close, but you’ve got to stand there because you never know when the door will open and you’ll get in.”

The next week, President Clinton, having soured on some leading candidates, invited Ginsburg in for an interview; she wowed him, and the week after that they were in the White House Rose Garden, announcing that he was nominating Ginsburg to the Supreme Court as the country’s second female justice.

When Marty passed away, Goldberg recalled, “I told Justice Ginsburg that I often thought of that advice – sometimes when important things were not going my way, and often when I was standing on a subway platform, thinking I’d missed a train – and it had frequently worked in both settings.”

Working as an appellate court law clerk for Ginsburg, and later as a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice David Souter the same year Ginsburg replaced Byron White on the bench, Goldberg had a front-row seat to many of the character traits that made the late justice such a beloved figure: her calm, her wit, her considered review of legal cases, her considerate treatment of others, and her belief that all humans are equal and should be treated as such. 

“She was not completely of this world, but she was a beautiful human in all the important ways,” said Goldberg, who recalled a painful time when his mother was in a coma at the hospital, and Ginsburg called to send her love. “I don’t know how she even heard about it.”

Personally and professionally, “she modeled civility,” Goldberg said. 

On the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ginsburg served alongside more conservative judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Despite their differences of opinion, “she was very friendly with them,” Goldberg said.  Where other judges would get “into kindergarten mode and snap at each other and be sarcastic,” Ginsburg “wanted people to agree, and if they disagreed, to disagree in a respectful way.”

Much like her friendship with the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, “she connected to smart, funny people,” Goldberg said, citing Ginsburg’s late husband, and perennial jokester, Marty, as the prime example. The two met while attending Cornell University, married in 1954, and enjoyed a romantic and intellectual partnership for 56 years until Marty’s death in 2010.

As much as Ginsburg influenced Goldberg’s professional life, her relationship with her husband, Marty, had an equally profound effect. “That was for all of us another huge part of our life education, seeing this marriage that works so beautifully and had so much love and respect and support,” said Goldberg, who was dating his now-wife at the time he clerked for Ginsburg.

Marty was such a critical part of Ginsburg’s success and happiness that Goldberg was surprised to see Ginsburg become a cultural and feminist icon after her husband’s death, memorialized in books and movies and T-shirts. 

One of her stops a few years before her death was in 2017 at Stanford University, where Goldberg was teaching a Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. With RBG mania in full swing, Ginsburg had come to campus to give a speech to the more than 1,000 people who had won a lottery to attend.

“It was raucous for all these people for whom she was this hero, which was so gratifying but also so totally unforeseen when I had worked for her,” said Goldberg, who said he “blundered his way into a very small dinner” while she was in town and sat right next to her. 

“She was so excited about everything that was going on in her life and traveling and the art and opera she’d seen, and I just thought, ‘This is amazing.’ The fact that she dealt with the loss of Marty and turned around and did all these new things and got the best out of life, it’s just amazing and inspiring to me.”