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.

During oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices can ask some wacky questions.

In a speech last week before a local bar association in New York State, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recapped some of her favorite doozies from the term just past.

“Questions from the bench ranged from the historical: ‘[W]hat [did] James Madison th[ink] about video games[?]’” Ginsburg noted, referring to Justice Samuel Alito’s question in the violent video games case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., “to the practical: ‘[I]sn’t . . . evidence always . . . destroyed when . . . marijuana [once possessed by a suspect] is . . . smoked?  Isn’t it being burnt up?’” That question was from Justice Anthony Kennedy in the search and seizure case Kentucky v. King.

“Colleagues have been fearful: ‘Does al-Qaeda know all this stuff?’” she continued, a reference to Justice Antonin Scalia’s query in NASA v. Nelson.

Another kicker, also posed by Scalia in Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Siracusano: “What do you think about Satan?”

Ginsburg observed that she herself  “uttered none of the just-recited lines.  For, as the New York Times reported, based originally on an empirical study by a former law clerk of mine, when it comes to oral argument, I am—quote—‘ the least funny Justice who talks.’”

[DC Dicta would like the justice to note that, according to our count, that is not true. Last term Ginsburg proved to be funnier than Justices Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.]

“Couldn’t think of leaving until after it is returned to me, which won’t be anytime soon.”

~ Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a note to the Associated Press, saying that she will not consider retirement from the Supreme Court bench before the conclusion of a traveling art exhibition that includes a painting by Josef Albers that usually hangs in her office.

Justice Stephen Breyer is recovering from injuries he suffered when he took a spill on his bicycle over the weekend near his home in Cambridge, Mass.

The 72-year-old justice suffered a broken collarbone in the accident, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told the Associated Press. Breyer was not at the Court Tuesday when decisions were announced, but is expected to attend speaking engagements this week as scheduled.

This isn’t the first time Breyer was injured in Cambridge on a bike. In 1993, when he was a First Circuit judge being considered by President Bill Clinton for a Supreme Court spot, Breyer was hit by a car while riding his bike in Harvard Square. He suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs, but still traveled to Washington to be interviewed by the president. Clinton picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But it all worked out in the end – Breyer got the nod a year later.

Should Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer consider the political climate when making their retirement plans?

While both justices have repeatedly stated that they have no intention of stepping down from the Supreme Court any time soon, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy thinks that the jurists should consider hanging up their robes now.

The reason: with President Barack Obama facing unsure reelection prospects, this summer is the last chance for the president to get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed. And if the president loses his reelection bid, his Republican predecessor will almost surely be the one to replace Ginsburg, 78, and Breyer, 72 – thus shifting the collective ideology of the Court decidedly to the right.

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

They often attend (and sometimes perform in) the opera together, and last year they ended up at the same restaurant – unwittingly – to celebrate their respective birthdays. We don’t know what her birthday plans are this year, but today Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns 78 -just four days after Justice Antonin Scalia turned 75.