The route to becoming aSupreme Court justiceis paved with legal briefs , opinions , diary articles , and other compose works . In short , you ’d likely never get there without a strong writing voice and a bent for clear communicating .
Ruth Bader Ginsburglearned these skills from one of the good : Vladimir Nabokov . Though most famous for his 1955 novelLolita , the Russian - American author wrote countless works in many more formats , from short stories and essays to verse form and play . He also taught literature courses at several universities around the country , including Cornell — where Bader Ginsburgreceivedher undergrad level in the early 1950s . While there , she took Nabokov ’s course on European literature , and his lessons made an impingement that would last for decades to come .
“ He was a humans who was in love with the sound of words . It had to be the right Holy Writ and in the right Good Book order . So he change the way I read , the means I pen . He was an enormous influence , ” Ginsburg said in aninterviewwith legal writing expert Bryan A. Garner . “ To this day I can hear some of the thing that he suppose . Bleak House[byCharles Dickens ] was one of the books that we read in his course , and he started out just reading the first few pages about the fog and Miss Flite . So those were strong influences on my authorship . ”
As Literary Hubreports , it was n’t the only time RBG mentioned Nabokov ’s focus not only on word choice , but also on Holy Scripture placement ; she repeated the subject matter in a 2016 op - male erecticle dysfunction forThe New York Times . “ password could paint motion picture , I acquire from him , ” shewrote . “ Choosing the good word , and the right Son order , he illustrated , could make an enormous deviation in conveying an image or an idea . ”
While neither Dickens nor Nabokov were writing for a legal consultation , their power to provoke a certain sympathy or chemical reaction from readers was something Ginsburg would go on to emulate whenexpressing herselfin and out of the court . In this way , Nabokov ’s tutelage elucidate the latitude betweenliteratureandlaw .
“ I think that police force should be a literary professing , and the undecomposed legal practician gaze law as an artistic creation as well as a craft , ” she told Garner .
