SAN FRANCISCO -- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking to law students in San Francisco, called Thursday for equality for gays and lesbians and said the court should return to a 1972 ruling that halted executions nationwide.

"We should not be stopped from pursuing whatever talent God has given us simply because we are of a certain race, a certain religion, a certain national origin, a certain gender or gender preference," Ginsburg said at UC Hastings College of the Law.

The court has adopted constitutional barriers against discrimination based on all those categories except sexual orientation. It could confront that issue in one of several cases now pending in lower courts, including a challenge to California's ban on same-sex marriage that is awaiting review by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The justices struck down state laws against gay and lesbian sexual activity in 2003 without deciding how to review other laws that treat people differently based on sexual orientation. Referring to that case, Ginsburg said the court "recognized that consensual relations between two people do no harm to anyone and cannot be subject to government prohibitions."

Capital punishment

The subject of capital punishment came up when Hastings Professor Joan Williams, who conducted the 90-minute question-and-answer session, asked the 78-year-old justice what she would like to accomplish in her remaining years on the court.

"I would probably go back to the day when the Supreme Court said the death penalty could not be administered with an even hand, but that's not likely to be an opportunity for me," Ginsburg said.

She was referring to the ruling in a 1972 Georgia case that overturned all state death penalty laws, which had allowed judges and juries to impose death for any murder. Four years later, the court upheld another Georgia law that prescribed death for specific categories of murder and gave guidance to juries, a model that California followed when it renewed capital punishment in 1977.

Ginsburg described review of impending executions as "a dreadful part of the business," and said she has chosen not to follow the path of the late Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan - who declared in every capital case that they considered the death penalty unconstitutional - so that she could maintain a voice in the debate.

Ginsburg, a pioneering women's rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, was appointed to the court by President Bill Clinton in 1993 after 13 years on a federal appeals court. She has had two cancer operations but has expressed no intention of retiring.

She recalled that Clinton had cleared her nomination in advance with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose approval paved the way for the Senate's 96-3 confirmation vote. That would never happen in today's bitterly divided Congress, Ginsburg said.

'Bright minds'

"Someday we will get back to the way it once was, but it will take people on both sides of the aisle who really care ... for making government work," she said.

She also said the court should not shy away from considering decisions of foreign and international courts - not as binding authority on the meaning of the Constitution, but as a recognition that "there are bright minds in other places struggling with the same human rights issues."

Conservative justices like Antonin Scalia have denounced references to foreign rulings, but Ginsburg said a majority of the court has recognized their value when examining universal concerns. She singled out for praise an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that refused to allow police to torture a man who allegedly knew where a bomb was set to explode.

"If we allow security concerns to so overwhelm our deep attachment to fundamental values, to the dignity of each person," Ginsburg told the students, "we will come more and more to look like our enemy."