
Sep 25, 2020 / 12:29PM
In February 2016 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg met with a select group of NYU Florence students in the living room of the historic Villa La Pietra at NYU Florence. Students had the extraordinary opportunity to address questions to the Justice about everything from the Citizens United ruling, planned parenthood, income inequality and raising taxes on the rich, to eminent domain and the Black Lives Matter movement. NYU Liberal Studies Freshmen Helen You and Ismail Ibrahim characterized their meeting with Ginsburg as ’empowering’.”Without her, I don’t think most of us [female students] would be thinking about becoming a lawyer, or a doctor,’ You said. “She kept turning it back on us”, Ibrahim continued, “She kept emphasizing that it is important that like-minded people work together to achieve what they think is right. The values of the constitution would only be ink on paper if citizens didn’t take them to heart and fight for them.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg had previously been at Villa La Pietra in August 20, 1995 (Conference Over the Role of Constitutional Courts) and in July 2003 (Transatlantic Dialogue on the Constitutional Future of Europe).
Questions and reactions from some of the NYU Students who participated in the February 2016 meeting with the Justice