In USA Today, Justice Ginsburg, the only female on the Supreme Court, says that the high court needs another woman.  Yet the reasons she gives run counter to the purpose of the Supreme Court, which is to interpret the laws and the Constitution of the United States.

Her status as the court’s lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl’s lasting humiliation, but Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager.

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

Understanding and empathy for one side or the other in a dispute should be completely irrelevant to the interpretation of the law and the Constitution.   Of course it can go the other way, too:

Often Ginsburg’s view as the court’s only woman emerges in an understated way. The strip-search case that began in 2003 was different: Of all the justices, Ginsburg was the most focused on the plight of Arizona student Savana Redding.

After a classmate told the vice principal at the Safford Middle School that Savana had unauthorized prescription-strength ibuprofen, the vice principal directed a nurse and administrative aide to strip-search the girl. Savana’s mother, April Redding, sued the school district for violating her daughter’s right to be free from unreasonable searches. Authorities found no drugs on Savana.

“After Redding was searched and nothing was found, she was put in a chair outside the vice principal’s office for over two hours, and her mother wasn’t called,” Ginsburg noted during oral arguments. “What was the reason for … putting her in that humiliating situation?”

One of Ginsburg’s liberal colleagues, fellow Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, saw it a little differently. He said he had a hard time understanding the girl’s claim that her rights had been violated.

“I’m trying to work out why is this a major thing to, say, strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym,” Breyer said. “How bad is this?”

Ginsburg retorted that school officials had directed Redding “to shake (her) bra out, to shake, shake, stretch the top of (her) pants.”

She later told USA TODAY, “Maybe a 13-year-old boy in a locker room doesn’t have that same feeling about his body. But a girl who’s just at the age where she is developing, whether she has developed a lot … or … has not developed at all (might be) embarrassed about that.”

Breyer is, of course, another liberal.  It does not matter, Justice Breyer, that you might not be embarrassed in such as situation.  Nor, Justice Ginsburg, does it matter that you would be.  In fact, it does not even matter what the particular girl in question felt about it at the time.  The only things that matters are the law and the Constitution.

Then there is the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case, in which Justice Ginsburg read her dissent aloud in court.

This was the case, yet to be ruled upon, that Ginsburg felt repeated Ledbetter. That 5-4 opinion written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito — who succeeded O’Connor — rejected the notion that pay discrimination is harder to detect than other job bias and dismissed the “policy” argument that the law allows more flexibility for suing in such situations.

Ginsburg was so incensed by the decision that she took the unusual step of reading her dissenting opinion from the bench and called on Congress to reverse the court.

Congressional legislation, signed into law by Obama as one of his first official acts, gave workers far more freedom to sue for pay bias long after it began.

Ginsburg said in an interview that she believed some of her male colleagues had trouble understanding the difficulty of getting pay-disparity information and the general reluctance of women to claim a workplace policy is unfair.

“As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” said Ginsburg, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native and Democrat. “I have no doubt that she would have understood Lilly Ledbetter’s situation.”

This certainly gives the appearance that Justice O’Connor’s sex discrimination rulings were biased.   That is not to say that the decisions of the men were unbiased.  If fact, I concur with Justice Ginsburg’s dissent — it is both well-reasoned and well-founded on precedent.  The majority opinion was that the act of giving lesser pay-raises were the discriminatory acts, while Ginsburg (three others’ concurring) argued that each paycheck was an act of discrimination.  Since it is certainly within the power of Goodyear to grant out-of-cycle raises, I must also concur with Ginsburg.

And if I may digress to fire a salvo at the “conservative” side of the court, I have a problem with Justice Scalia’s questioning in the case of AT&T this term, in which the company is accused of discriminating against pregnant employees:

When the attorney for the women challenging AT&T took his turn at the lectern, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that if the court ruled against the company in the case involving retroactive benefits, more lawsuits would come.

“You’re scaring me,” Scalia said, drawing laughter from spectators — but not from Ginsburg.

I do not give a rat’s patootie how many lawsuits will be filed — if illegal acts have been committed, then the law should be applied in every one of those cases.  One cannot say that the law should not be applied as it is written, or that one’s Constitutional rights should not be protected, just because a lot of people may demand justice.  That is not my idea of conservatism, Justice Scalia.