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On Justice Ginsburg’s Summer Docket: Blunt Talk on Big Cases

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court.Credit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most outspoken member of the Supreme Court, sometimes to her regret. Last year, she issued a statement saying that her criticisms of Donald J. Trump during the presidential campaign had been ill advised. “In the future,” she said, “I will be more circumspect.”

She has stayed true to her word, to a point, but she remains blunt and candid. In a pair of recent appearances, Justice Ginsburg critiqued the Trump administration’s travel ban, previewed the coming court term, predicted an end to capital punishment and suggested that the other branches of government are in disarray.

Justice Ginsburg, 84, also described her grueling exercise routine, her link to a rap icon and her “graveyard” dissents.

The first appearance came two days after the Supreme Court issued a terse and cryptic unsigned order recalibrating how much of Mr. Trump’s travel ban could be enforced while court challenges to it move forward. The order was two sentences long, and you could figure out what it meant mostly by inference.

The bottom line was a split decision: The administration could continue to bar many refugees but had to allow travel from six predominantly Muslim countries by grandparents and other relatives of United States residents.

Supreme Court justices typically let rulings in pending cases speak for themselves. Justice Ginsburg, delivering prepared remarks on July 21 at a Duke University School of Law event in Washington, explained what the court had meant in some detail. She made clear that she considered the recent order a rebuke to the Trump administration, saying its policy had been “too restrictive.”

“Just this week, we clarified that closely related persons include grandparents,” she said. “We decided that the government had been too restrictive in what family relationships qualify as close.”

“The court also said,” Justice Ginsburg continued, apparently referring to an earlier ruling, “that other people who could not be brought under the ban include students admitted to U.S. universities, a worker who has accepted employment from a U.S. company and a lecturer invited to address a U.S. audience. As to those individuals, the executive order may not be enforced pending our decision in the cases we will hear in October.”

Justice Ginsburg discussed several other cases on the court’s docket next term, including ones on the privacy of information held by cellphone companies, a clash between claims of religious freedom and same-sex marriage and a constitutional challenge to partisan gerrymandering.

That last case, Gill v. Whitford, No. 16-1161, could reshape American politics. Justice Ginsburg said the court’s decision to hear the case was “perhaps the most important grant so far.”

“So far, the court has held race-based gerrymandering unconstitutional but has not found a manageable, reliable measure of fairness for determining whether a partisan gerrymander violates the Constitution,” she said.

In all, she said, “one can safely predict that next term will be a momentous one.”

The court was shorthanded for much of the past two terms, from the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 to the arrival of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch in April 2017.

The court mostly managed to avoid 4-to-4 deadlocks in the term that ended in June, rescheduling just two cases for reargument before a full court in the next term, starting in October. In general, Justice Ginsburg said, the justices try to achieve consensus, particularly in minor cases.

She said she will sometimes go along with the majority in, say, a tax case. “Even though I disagree, I will bury my dissent,” she said. “We call that a graveyard dissent.”

When the stakes are higher, she said, she takes a different approach. “I will never compromise,” she said, “when it’s a question of, say, freedom of speech or press, gender equality.”

A few days later, Justice Ginsburg spoke at George Washington University Law School, at an event sponsored by the Washington Council of Lawyers, a bar association.

Asked about the future of the death penalty in the United States, Justice Ginsburg did not mention a 2015 dissent in which she and Justice Stephen G. Breyer had called for a fresh look at the constitutionality of the practice. But she said capital punishment may soon be extinct in any event.

“The incidence of capital punishment has gone down, down, down so that now, I think, there are only three states that actually administer the death penalty,” she said. “We may see an end to capital punishment by attrition as there are fewer and fewer executions.”

The number of executions has indeed fallen sharply, with only 20 carried out in 2016, the smallest number in decades. But seven states have executed condemned inmates this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Her fans call her Notorious R.B.G., a nod to the rapper Notorious B.I.G., and Justice Ginsburg embraced the connection. “We were both born and bred in Brooklyn, New York,” she said.

Justice Ginsburg said she works out with a personal trainer, completing squats, planks and push-ups while she watches public television. In October, her trainer, Bryant Johnson, will publish “The R.B.G. Workout: How She Stays Strong ... and You Can Too!” It will include, the book’s publisher said, “four-color illustrations of the justice in workout gear.”

Justice Ginsburg did not mention Mr. Trump at either of her recent appearances, but she did say the Supreme Court enjoyed a more favorable reputation than the other parts of the federal government.

“If you took a poll today of the three branches of government, which one do the people think is doing the best job?” she asked. “We’re way out in front of Congress.”

She said nothing about the executive branch, or the man who leads it.

Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter @adamliptak.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: On Summer Docket, Blunt Talk on Big Cases. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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