An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University’s plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published. Link
I contacted Greg Brock, the Times senior editor in charge of corrections, for some background. Here’s what he said:
What’s interesting is that Ginsburg has never complained. And oddly, no one in the Washington bureau ever noticed it. Not even Linda Greenhouse, our recently departed court reporter. (Though Linda never misspelled it.) And I can find only one modern-day misspelling from the Washington bureau.
Sometimes, when we keep misspelling a name, I take the time just to see how many times we have misspelled it. I remember Attorney General Gonzales was a problem for a while.
About a year ago, we were doing more of these archive searches and including references in some corrections, but we decided to ease up. It can come across as a sledge hammer if we’re not careful. So we now try to use it when we want to emphasize the point. In this case, since a reader pointed out that we had never corrected it, it seemed worth owning up to that.
