Best To Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Supreme Court Justice went pretty quickly from routine checkup to pancreatic cancer surgery.

The 75-year-old Justice Ginsburg, the only woman now serving on the court, was treated for colon cancer a decade ago. After a pioneering career as a legal advocate for women's rights, a law professor and a federal appellate judge, she was elevated to the high court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and has been a reliable member of the court's liberal wing.

The court said Justice Ginsburg had no symptoms prior to her annual checkup in late January at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., where a CAT scan detected a tumor one centimeter across in the center of her pancreas. Last week, Justice Ginsburg and her husband, tax lawyer and law professor Martin Ginsburg, visited specialists in New York, people familiar with the matter said.

She had surgery Thursday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the court said. It also said that her attending surgeon, Murray Brennan, expected the justice to remain hospitalized for seven to 10 days.

Best wishes to her for a speedy recovery. Speculating about the Court is ghoulish at this time and I won't do so. Ginsburg has been a pretty stalwart protector of Constitutional rights and I hope she's back on the bench soon.