Clarisse Bourgeon, ECoJ Candidate Offers Interview on "Ellen Show"

Photo on the set.
Montague.-
Ellen: First of all, congratulations on the milestone of turning 70, of course, and being on our Royal Court for more than two decades now. I mean what a legacy, congratulations.
Justice Clarisse Bourgeon: Thank you very much, I’m a lucky woman.
Ellen: What's it like coming to the Court after having been a litigator before the Court, who has a relationship with the justices that suddenly you’re serving next to?
JCB: I had a middle period. I was for 13 years on the Court of Appeals for the Montague Circuit so I had already made the transition from advocate to judging. It’s great to be in the position of asking questions and not having to answer questions. I know many a lawyer would like to respond to our question with another question but that's not cricket.
Ellen: Does Justice Clarisse Bourgeon, the 70-year-old feminist icon, have any regrets about her professional life?
JCB: Hardly. I do think that I was born under a very bright star," Laughs and smiles" I don't think there's going to be any turning back to old ways, when you think about — the world has changed really in what women are doing. I went to law school when women were less than 3% of lawyers in the country; today, they are 50%. I never had a woman teacher in college or in law school. The changes have been enormous. And they've just — they've gone much too far [to be] going back. All women are icons in their professional lives."Applauses
Ellen: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?
JCB: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. So we have a policies that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.
Ellen: When you say that reproductive rights need to be straightened out, what do you mean?
JCB: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.
Ellen: Does that mean getting rid of the test the court imposed, in which it allows member states to impose restrictions on abortion — like a waiting period — that are not deemed an “undue burden” to a woman’s reproductive freedom?
JCB: Look I believe in the collegiality of the court but I’m not a big fan of these tests. I think the court uses them as a label that accommodates the result it wants to reach. It will be, it should be, that this is a woman’s decision. It’s entirely appropriate to say it has to be an informed decision, but that doesn’t mean you can keep a woman overnight who has traveled a great distance to get to the clinic, so that she has to go to some motel and think it over for 24 hours or 48 hours.
Ellen: In the 1980s, you wrote about how while the sphere for women has widened to include more work, men haven’t taken on as much domestic responsibility. Do you think that things are beginning to change?
JCB: That’s going to take time, changing that kind of culture. But looking at my own family, my daughter Anne Marie teaches at Bosco University, she travels all over the world, and she has the most outstanding supportive husband who certainly carries his fair share of the load. Although their division of labor is different than mine and my husband’s, because my daughter is a super cook.
Ellen: Can courts play a role in changing that culture?
JCB: Look in our country the Legislature, such as the European Council too can make the change, can facilitate the change, as laws and acts do. But it’s not something a court can decree. A court can’t tell the man, You’ve got to do more than carry out the garbage.