The Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1993 to 2020. After graduating from Columbia Law School, the Brooklyn native became a staunch courtroom advocate for the fair treatment of women, working with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. In 1980, Ginsburg was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where she served for 13 years. She was then appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, becoming the second woman to hold the position. Widely considered a feminist icon, Ginsburg stayed on the bench until her death in September 2020 at the age of 87.

Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a low-income, working-class neighborhood. Her father, Nathan Bader, was a Russian-born Jewish immigrant who worked as a fur manufacturer, and her mother, Celia Bader, was a homemaker. When Ginsberg was just 1 year old, her older sister, and only sibling, Marilyn, died of meningitis at the age of 6.

Ginsburg’s mother was a major influence in her life and taught her the value of independence and a good education. Celia herself did not attend college, instead working in a garment factory to help pay for her brother’s college education—an act of selflessness that forever impressed Ginsburg.

At James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Ginsburg worked diligently and excelled in her studies. Sadly, her mother was diagnosed with cancer during Ginsburg’s high school years and died the day before her graduation.

Ginsburg earned her bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University in 1954, finishing first in her class. Shortly after graduation, on June 23, 1954, she married Martin “Marty” Ginsburg. The pair met on a blind date.

In 1956, now a wife and mother, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she learned to balance her family life and her new role as a law student. She also encountered a very male-dominated, hostile environment, with only eight other females in her class of more than 500. The women were chided by the law school’s dean for taking the places of qualified males. But Ginsburg pressed on and excelled academically, eventually becoming the first female member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Around this time, Martin, also at Harvard Law, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Upon his graduation, Martin, now in remission, accepted a position at a law firm in New York City. To join her husband, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School in 1958. There, she was elected to the school’s law review and graduated first in her class in 1959.

Despite her outstanding academic record, Ginsburg struggled to find a law firm that would hire her, often facing discrimination because she was both a woman and a mother. It wasn’t until her former Columbia professor Gerald Gunter vouched for her that she secured a position clerking for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri in 1959. After two years, Ginsburg entered the job market once again, and while she received some offers, she faced much lower pay than her male counterparts.

She soon embraced academia, joining the faculty at Rutgers University Law School before teaching at Columbia from 1972 to 1980, where she became the school’s first female tenured professor. During the 1970s, she also served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, for which she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ginsburg believed the law was gender-blind, meaning all groups are entitled to equal rights. One of the five cases she won before the Supreme Court involved a portion of the Social Security Act that favored women over men because it granted certain benefits to widows but not widowers.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She served as a federal judge for 13 years before she earned her next major appointment.

In 1993, Ginsberg was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton. She was selected to serve as an associate justice, filling the seat vacated by Justice Byron White. President Clinton wanted a replacement with the intellect and political skills to deal with the more conservative members of the Court.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were unusually friendly, despite frustration expressed by some senators over Ginsburg’s evasive answers to hypothetical situations. Several expressed concern over how she could transition from social advocate to Supreme Court Justice. In the end, however, she was easily confirmed by the Senate, 96–3.

As a judge, Ginsburg favored caution, moderation, and restraint. She was considered part of the Supreme Court’s moderate-liberal bloc presenting a strong voice in favor of gender equality, the rights of workers, and the separation of church and state. In 1996 Ginsburg wrote the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Virginia, which held that the state-supported Virginia Military Institute could not refuse to admit women. In 1999, she won the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for her contributions to gender equality and civil rights.

As a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg’s first major landmark case was in United States v. Virginia in 1996. She authored the majority opinion, ruling that the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admission policy was unconstitutional. The decision effectively prohibited state-run institutions from excluding women.

Despite her reputation for restrained writing, she gathered considerable attention for her dissenting opinion in the case of Bush v. Gore, which effectively decided the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Objecting to the court’s majority opinion favoring Bush, Ginsburg deliberately and subtly concluded her decision with the words, “I dissent”—a significant departure from the tradition of including the adverb “respectfully.”

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority in two landmark Supreme Court rulings. On June 25th, she was one of the six justices to uphold a critical component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act in King v. Burwell. The decision allows the federal government to continue providing subsidies to Americans who purchase health care through “exchanges,” regardless of whether they are state or federally operated. The majority ruling, read by Chief Justice John Roberts, was a massive victory for President Barack Obama and made the Affordable Care Act difficult to undo. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia were in dissent, with Scalia presenting a scathing dissenting opinion to the Court.

On June 26, the Supreme Court handed down its second historic decision in as many days, with a 5–4 majority ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Ginsburg is considered to have been instrumental in the decision, showing public support for the idea in previous years by officiating same-sex marriages and by challenging arguments against it during the early proceedings of the case. She was joined in the majority by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, with Roberts reading the dissenting opinion this time.

In April 2018, Ginsburg notched another career milestone by assigning a majority opinion for the first time in her 25 years with the court. The ruling for Sessions v. Dimaya, which drew attention for conservative Neil Gorsuch’s decision to vote with his liberal colleagues, struck down a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allowed the deportation of any foreign national convicted of a “crime of violence.” Holding seniority among the majority, Ginsburg ultimately assigned the task of penning the opinion to Elena Kagan.

Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at her home in Washington, D.C., from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was 87 years old. Just days later, Ginsburg laid in state in the U.S. Capitol, becoming the first woman and second Supreme Court Justice to have this honor.

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement after her death. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her—a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”