Pioneer of gender equality law was US Supreme Court’s voice of reason

Whenever Ruth Bader Ginsburg fell ill, liberal America held its breath. To many it was Bader Ginsburg, who has died aged 87, who was the voice of reason in a nation divided on ideological grounds, with her cautious words and constant attempts to build a consensus no matter who was involved.

On abortion she declared that ‘‘the government has no business making that choice for a woman’’; on the death penalty she declined to answer questions during her confirmation hearings lest she should need to vote on the matter in the future; on gender equality she was credited with helping to inspire legislation on fair pay; and on the right to bear arms she argued that the Second

Amendment applied to a time when states needed to keep militias to preserve the new nation and therefore in modern times ‘‘its function has become obsolete’’.

Yet her views were often more nuanced than the headlines would suggest. In the case of Roe v Wade, which legalised abortion in the US, she was critical of the Supreme Court’s decision, delivered on the basis of privacy rather than sex discrimination, claiming that it ‘‘presented an incomplete justification for [the court’s] ruling’’ and stored up trouble for the future. Unlike many of her more parochial colleagues, Bader Ginsburg was happy to consider foreign interpretations of law, both for their persuasive value and their wisdom.

As public discourse grew increasingly ill tempered in the 21st century, she was something of a lone voice in her calls for moderation, urging those who disagreed with court judgments to resist describing them as ‘‘outrageous’’, ‘‘inexplicable’’ or ‘‘Orwellian’’. Yet she could be unsparing in her own dissents. When the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v Holder (2013) that America had changed so much for the better that states and counties no longer needed federal clearance before changing local voting laws, she denounced her colleagues’ judgment as ‘‘like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet’’.

She was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who ran his own business as a furrier that later went bankrupt, and his wife Celia. She studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In 1954, a month after graduating, she married Martin Ginsburg, known as Marty, who became a law professor. By the age of 21 she was in Oklahoma, where Marty had been called up for military service. While working in a social security office she was demoted for becoming pregnant, an experience that would lead to her concealing her second pregnancy.

Marty had testicular cancer diagnosed in 1957 and she not only cared for him and their baby, but also attended his classes and helped to write his papers. He died in 2010 and she is survived by their two children.

Bader Ginsburg’s law studies took her to Harvard. When Marty found work in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School. Despite coming top in her class she struggled to find work. ‘‘I was Jewish, a woman and a mother,’’ she said of the three strikes against her. Even Felix Frankfurter, who in 1948 was the first Supreme Court justice to hire an African-American clerk, refused to hire a woman.

By 1963 she was a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she co-founded the women’s rights project for the American Civil Liberties Union, becoming the union’s counsel. Her first landmark case before the Supreme Court was Frontiero v Richardson (1973), in which she successfully argued that Sharron Frontiero, a US army lieutenant, should receive the same housing allowance as her male counterparts. ‘‘I ask no favour for my sex,’’ she told the nine male justices, quoting Sarah Grimke, a 19thcentury women’s rights advocate. ‘‘All I ask is that they take their feet off our necks.’’

Jimmy Carter brought her on to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. When Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993 she was the first Democratic nominee for 25 years, and only the second female in its history.

Some regarded her as rather timid during her first 13 years on the Supreme Court, but she got into her stride after Sandra Day O’Connor retired in 2006, leaving Bader Ginsburg as the only female justice. As the court became more conservative she was seen as moving to the left, and even her eagerly awaited fiery dissents were seen as an invitation to Congress to rethink the law. Nevertheless, she was painfully shy in public and is credited with inventing the phrase ‘‘gender inequality’’ because she could not bring herself to say the word ‘‘sex’’ in public.

She did not see her role as changing the constitution; indeed, she insisted that she had not done so. ‘‘I was just an advocate for seeing its full realisation,’’ she told one interviewer. ‘‘Even the Declaration of Independence starts out all men are created equal, so I see my advocacy as part of an effort to make the equality principle everything the founders would have wanted it to be.’’–

‘‘I see my advocacy as part of an effort to make the equality principle everything the founders would have wanted it to be.’’