Ginsburg returns to Supreme Court after surgery

WASHINGTON -- A healthy looking Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the Supreme Court's mahogany bench Monday, less than three weeks after she underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer.

Ginsburg smiled big as she entered the courtroom and, characteristically, asked tough questions of the lawyers in the first case of the day.

Ginsburg, who will be 76 next month, had surgery Feb. 5 to remove a one-centimeter pancreatic lesion that was discovered during a routine cancer screening.

Ginsburg, who a decade earlier survived colorectal cancer, has given no indication that she might retire soon. Such conjecture has continued, despite reports of Ginsburg's recovery. At a Republican dinner Saturday night, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., predicted Ginsburg would be dead from cancer in nine months, according to a report in Louisville's Courier-Journal newspaper.

Likely referring to the usual seriousness of pancreatic cancer, Bunning termed it "bad cancer ... the kind that you don't get better from."

John Allendorf, an attending surgeon in the pancreas center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia, said the median survival for Stage 1 disease — as Ginsburg apparently has — is two years. Allendorf is not involved in Ginsburg's treatment.

Ginsburg's appearance Monday is unlikely to further fuel retirement rumors. As the court heard arguments in an arcane dispute over a Navajo coal lease and a possible breach of trust by the U.S. government related to tribal resources, she was a vigorous questioner.

At one point, she added a little levity to the generally dry case that partly tested how a 2003 court ruling on the Navajo lease dispute should be interpreted. When Carter Phillips, arguing on behalf of the Navajo Nation, referred to some confusion arising from the earlier decision, Ginsburg, who wrote it, asked, "Do you think that was just carelessness on the court's part?"

For all appearances, Ginsburg, who spent a week in the hospital, acted as if nothing much had happened while the court was in its usual February recess.