Passion of a career
Justice crusaded against sex discrimination during career
Justice argued cases before Supreme Court as a women’s rights advocate before taking her own seat
Long before President Bill Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ginsburg argued cases before the court as a scholar and advocate of the women’s rights movement. She was a high-profile proponent of the unsuccessful effort to adopt an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
On the court, she built a record as one of the most liberal members, supporting gay and abortion rights, Obama’s health care law and restrictions on the death penalty.
Her strong dissents from rulings that cut back on voting rights and affirmative action won her the admiring nickname “Notorious R.B.G.” Two films about her were released in 2018: the documentary “RBG” and a Hollywood biography, “On the Basis of Sex.”
Ginsburg said she experienced gender discrimination personally when she tried, without success, to join New York City’s major law firms after being a star law student at Harvard and Columbia universities in the late 1950s.
Her experience was similar to that of the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, a Ronald Reagan appointee who joined the court in 1981 and retired in 2006.
Ginsburg made her clearest mark on the Supreme Court when she was fighting what she saw as gender discrimination, often challenging her male colleagues on views she considered sexist.
Step by gradual step, sometimes using men as the lead client, Ginsburg challenged unequal treatment of men and women in six cases, winning five. Her steady, incremental assault brought comparisons to how Thurgood Marshall challenged racial discrimination in the years before he joined the Supreme Court.
In one early win, Ginsburg helped argue the case of a female Air Force lieutenant whose husband was denied the housing allowances and medical benefits automatically given to military wives. In another case, she successfully represented a man seeking survivor benefits from Social Security after his wife died in childbirth, leaving him to raise his infant son. A subsequent case also won by Ginsburg extended the survivor benefits to all widowers, regardless of whether they had children.
When the court voted 5-4 in 2007 to uphold a federal ban on a late-term abortion procedure, Ginsburg took issue with the allmale majority’s professed concern that women might regret having an abortion and thus suffer a loss of self-esteem. Such thinking “reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution,” she wrote.
“I was a law school teacher,” she said during a 2015 interview at the court. “And that’s how I regard my role here with my colleagues, who haven’t had the experience of growing up female and don’t fully appreciate the arbitrary barriers that have been put in women’s way.”
Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-1 decision in 1996 that ended the menonly admission policy at the state-funded Virginia
Military Institute. In 2003, she joined the majority in upholding an affirmative action plan at the University of Michigan Law School, and she dissented in a second decision that overturned a race-conscious undergraduate admissions policy at the University of Michigan.
In 2013, she was the first justice to officiate at a same-sex marriage, and two years later was part of the 5-4 majority that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. She voted in two cases to uphold key provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and she dissented from the 5-4 Citizens United ruling in 2010 that struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending.
Since 2010, Ginsburg was the senior member of the court’s liberal wing, with the prerogative to write the main dissenting opinion.
She did just that in 2013, when a 5-4 court threw out a core part of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, citing reduced incidents of discrimination as a reason. Ginsburg said the majority’s approach was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
That dissent, and another one in an affirmative action case, inspired New York University law student Shana Knizhnik to create a Tumblr site dedicated to Ginsburg. She titled it Notorious R.B.G. — a play on the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. — offering T-shirts and an admiring book about Ginsburg.
Ginsburg became a devotee of the site. “I think it’s amusing,” she said in 2015. “It’s quite well done. There are some serious things on it. There are some funny things.”
In a 2009 interview with USA Today, Ginsburg said the Supreme Court needed more female justices. “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made,” said Ginsburg, who was the only woman on the high court from 2006, when O’Connor retired, to August 2009, when she was joined by Sonia Sotomayor. In 2010, the appointment of Elena Kagan raised the number of women to three.
President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980. In 13 years on that court, Ginsburg staked out the center as a swing vote who sided not infrequently with her Republican colleagues. Justice Byron White’s announcement in March 1993 that he would retire gave Democrats their first Supreme Court pick in more than 25 years.
The Senate confirmed Ginsburg 96-3. She offered a straightforward response when asked at her Senate hearing about abortion, saying the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee assured women “that she be the decision maker, that her choice be controlling” on such matters.