Update, July 15: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been discharged from the hospital a day after being admitted for a possible infection, a Supreme Court spokesperson said Wednesday afternoon. “She is home and doing well,” the spokesperson said.
The original post is below:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admitted Tuesday morning to a Baltimore hospital “for treatment of a possible infection” and will remain there for a few days so that she can receive intravenous antibiotic treatment, the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office announced this afternoon.
The 87-year-old justice was evaluated on Monday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., “after experiencing fever and chills,” the court indicated in a short press release. Although the justices’ summer recess officially began last week, the justices were working late Monday night and into Tuesday, considering (and ultimately granting) a request by the federal government to allow federal executions to resume after a hiatus of nearly 17 years. The court issued its 5-4 ruling at approximately 2 a.m. EDT on Tuesday after a flurry of last-minute emergency filings. Ginsburg joined dissents by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
Early Tuesday morning, Ginsburg was admitted to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where she underwent a procedure to “clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August,” when she was treated for a tumor on her pancreas. Ginsburg, the court indicated, is now “resting comfortably.”
This is Ginsburg’s second stay at Johns Hopkins in just over two months. In early May, she was treated there for what the court described as a “benign gall bladder condition” and participated in oral arguments by telephone from the hospital.
Before her treatment last year, Ginsburg had been treated for cancer three other times: She had surgery to remove cancerous growths from her lungs in December 2018, had a previous bout with pancreatic cancer in 2009 and was treated for colon cancer in 1999. She also underwent heart surgery in 2014.
This post is also published on SCOTUSblog.
