Justice Sonia Sotomayor isn’t the only one traveling during the U.S. Supreme Court’s winter break. Her colleague, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is on a “listening tour” of Egypt and Tunisia.

Though few details of the justice’s trip have been released – presumably due to security concerns, according to FindLaw – the justice is traveling with her daughter, Columbia law professor Jane Ginsburg. According to the State Department, Ginsburg plans to meet with Egypt’s  top judges and “listen and learn” about the country’s transition to democracy in the wake of the uprisings last year.

Ginsburg’s presence in Egypt and Tunisia is a show of support for officials there, Findlaw reports, and the justice is ready to offer her insights if requested. “Justice Ginsburg would be pleased to answer questions about the U.S. legal system and Constitution,” a State Department press release states.

Ever wonder what Supreme Court justices do when they are not thumbing through briefs, grilling attorneys from the bench or writing long legal opinions? Why, they hang out with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, of course!

At least that is what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got to do this week. The justice was one of the guests at the very late-night afterparty following the Washington premiere of Jolie’s directorial debut ‘Blood and Honey,” the Washington Post’s Reliable Source reports.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has twice battled cancer and has since been the subject of speculative whispers regarding whether and when she would step down from the Supreme Court bench, told USA Today that she feels fine and isn’t going anywhere.

Ginsburg said she received a clean bill of health after her most recent annual checkup. Ginsburg, 78, has shot down retirement rumors before, saying that she’d like to stay on the bench until she is at least 82 – the age at which Justice Louis Brandeis retired from the Court in 1939.

But as the next presidential election looms just one year away, speculation over Ginsburg’s future on the Court and the implication of a possible vacancy next term have some left leaning political commentators  openly urging Ginsburg to step down now. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote that Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer should consider hanging up their robes so that President Barack Obama gets two more Supreme Court appointments before his first term ends.

“If Obama loses, they will have contributed to a disaster,” Kennedy wrote in a piece on The New Republic’s website.

Sometimes it’s important to disagree – even against a Supreme Court majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a crowd of female judges this weekend.

Ginsburg, speaking to a crowed of roughly 300 female judges at the National Association of Women Judges conference in Newark this weekend, said that she is not afraid to speak up when she disagrees with a judgment of the Court, the Star-Ledger reports.

“I will continue to speak out in dissent when important matters are at stake,” Ginsburg said.

By example, she referenced her dissent in the case Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. Speaking from the bench, she urged Congress to pass a law allowing women to file unequal pay suits if they learn of the pay disparity beyond the 180 filing deadline under federal law. Congress subsequently passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act doing just that.

Ginsburg said speaking out in dissent can even win over fellow justices.

“On rare occasions, a dissent turns the court and becomes the opinion of the Court,” Ginsburg said.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is safe and unharmed after she and 178 other passengers were evacuated from a plane at Dulles International Airport Wednesday after an engine fire was reported by the pilot.

The plane, United Airlines Flight 586, was scheduled to fly to San Francisco and was still on the ground when the Ginsburg and the other passengers were directed to exit via emergency slides. They returned to the terminal and no one was seriously injured.

Readers of this blog know that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a fan of the theatre. So it should be no surprise that the justice caught a performance of “The Boy Detective Fails” at the Signature Theatre Company in Arlington Sunday.

But apparently Ginsburg was not a big fan of the venue’s air conditioning settings.  According to the Washington Examiner, Ginsburg was spotted during intermission – accompanied by a security detail – going to her car and retrieving a shawl to wear for the balance of the show.

She may not pull in a lot of laughs during oral arguments, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is laughing all the way to the bank as the Court’s wealthiest Supreme Court justice by a long shot, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

With a net worth somewhere between $10.7 million and a whopping $45.5 million, Ginsburg easily tops the list of wealthiest justices, according to the center, which crunched the justices’ financial disclosure data from 2009 (the report based on the latest 2010 filings will be unveiled in the fall). Ginsburg’s holdings include a $6 million retirement nest egg.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s second-place finish is attributable mainly to an array of investments (some of which spur him to recuse himself in cases involving the companies he invests in). His wealth is estimated to be between $4.6 million and $16.2 million.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan are also millionaires, according to the analysis, though none come close to Ginsburg or even Breyer.

And while Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas can each claim a net worth well in the six-digit range, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cannot. In fact, she could be the only justice in the red. Her net worth is somewhere between $95,000 in debt to $50,000, according to the report.

When President Bill Clinton was in office, he hoped to start a tradition: sitting down regularly with the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it never happened. According to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, something came up.

“He was hit first with Paula Jones and then other things,” Ginsburg told a crowd of about 2,000 at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas Monday, according to the Associated Press.

In her remarks, Ginsburg also lamented the polarization of the Supreme Court confirmation process, saying that she doubts she would have been confirmed if she were nominated today.

“I wish we could wave a magic wand and go back to the days when the process was bipartisan,” Ginsburg told the crowd, adding: “Today, my ACLU connection would probably disqualify me.”

Prior to her appointment as a federal judge on the DC Circuit, Ginsburg was general counsel for the ACLU, and helped found the group’s Women’s Right Project. Such a resume item would prove too controversial to win confirmation today, Ginsburg said. Even in 1993, White House officials prepping her for her Senate hearings warned her it would be a hot-button topic.

She told them: “There’s nothing you can do to get me to bad mouth the ACLU.”

If asked where they were when the earthquake of August 2011 hit, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan will have the same answer: “I was at the Court!”

The justices were not harmed, and the building was not evacuated as many other Washington buildings were, Bloomberg reports, although no one else was allowed enter the Supreme Court building following the quake. Damage to the Court’s building was minor, according to the Detroit Free Press and other reports, and  included fallen plaster in the gym located on the top floor, and small shards of marble near elevators on the first floor.

Other federal courts in Washington also closed after the tremor, and most office buildings in the downtown area were evacuated, sending occupants – including lawyers at most law firms – into the streets to wait for long periods of time before making the very slow trek home via packed highways and slowed public rail systems.

Today, Washington’s courts and offices are reopening as normal. Back to work, everyone!

“I was very lucky to be born at the right time. If I had been born a generation earlier, my arguments would have fallen on deaf ears. It was the women’s movement… that made it possible for the Supreme Court to do what it did.”

~ Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking at a recent  judicial conference in California about successfully arguing before the high court in gender-based discrimination cases when she was an attorney for the ACLU.