SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, EQUAL RIGHTS PIONEER
Icon for feminists dies of pancreatic cancer after a lifetime of breaking glass ceilings
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court and a legal pioneer for gender equality whose fierce opinions as a justice made her a hero to the left, died Sept. 18 at her home in Washington. She was 87.
The death was announced in a statement by the U.S. Supreme Court. She had recently been treated for pancreatic cancer.
Born in Depression-era Brooklyn, Ginsburg excelled academically and went to the top of her law school class at a time when women were still called upon to justify taking a man’s place. She earned a reputation as the
legal embodiment of the women’s liberation movement and as a widely admired role model for generations of female lawyers.
Working in the 1970s with the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg successfully argued a series of cases before the high court that strategically chipped away at the legal wall of gender discrimination, eventually causing it to topple. Later, as a member of the court’s liberal block, she was a reliable vote to enhance the rights of women, protect affirmative action and minority voting rights and defend a woman’s right to choose an abortion.
On the court, she became an iconic figure to a new wave of young feminists, and her regal image as the “Notorious RBG” graced T-shirts and coffee mugs. She was delighted by the attention, although she said her law clerks had to explain that the moniker referred to a deceased rapper, the Notorious B.I.G. She also was the subject of a popular film documentary, “RBG” (2018).
When she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015, her colleague and improbable close friend, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote about her dual roles as crusader and judge. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had two distinguished legal careers, either one of which would alone entitle her to be one of Time’s 100,” wrote Scalia, who died in 2016.
NPR reported that Ginsburg, in a statement dictated to her granddaughter in recent days, said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
A landmark moment for Ginsburg came in 2011, when the court for the first time opened its term with three female justices. Ginsburg said in an interview with the Washington Post that it would “change the public perception of where women are in the justice system. When the schoolchildren file in and out of the court and they look up and they see three women, then that will seem natural and proper — just how it is.”
Her outspoken feminism played a role in Ginsburg’s success. President Bill Clinton acknowledged that in 1993 when he nominated her to replace retiring Justice Byron White. At the time, she was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
“Many admirers of her work say that she is to the women’s movement what former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African Americans,” Clinton said in Rose Garden ceremony. “I can think of no greater compliment to bestow on an American lawyer.”
( Justice Ginsburg herself usually demurred when the comparison was made, saying that Marshall literally risked his life defending Black clients in the segregated South and that her legal work required no such sacrifice.)
On the court, Ginsburg’s most notable rulings and dissents advanced feminist causes.
In 1996, she authored a groundbreaking decision ordering the Virginia Military Institute to admit women, ending a 157-year tradition of all-male education at the state-funded school.
While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection,” Ginsburg wrote in United States v. Virginia. The 7-to-1 decision was the capstone of the legal battle for gender equality, she said later.
“I regard the VMI case as the culmination of the 1970s endeavor to open doors so that women could aspire and achieve without artificial constraints,” Ginsburg said after the decision.
Later in her career, discrimination against women was the theme of several forceful dissents Justice Ginsburg read from the bench, a sparingly used bit of theater that justices employ to emphasize deeply held disagreements with a majority opinion.
Among them was a protest of the court’s decision to uphold a federal ban on so-called partialbirth abortions. “The court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.”
In another, she objected to a ruling that said workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination alleged to have begun years earlier. That case had been filed by Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., who sued after determining she was paid less than male coworkers.
If the law is often complex, her view of equality was simple, she once said.
“It has always been that girls should have the same opportunity to dream, to aspire and achieve — to do whatever their God-given talents enable them to do — as boys,” Ginsburg said in a 2015 conversation at the American Constitution Society. “There should be no place where there isn’t a welcome mat for women. … That’s what it’s all about: Women and men, working together, should help make the society a better place than it is now.”
Joan Ruth Bader — her mother suggested using her middle name in kindergarten to avoid confusion with other Joans in the class — was born on March 15, 1933. She was the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who became a furrier and haberdasher, and the former Celia Amster.
As a schoolgirl, Ginsburg — known to friends as “Kiki” — was smart, popular and competitive, both a bookworm and a baton twirler. But her early life was also shadowed by tragedy. Her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at age 8, leaving Ginsburg to be raised as an only child. She later said she grew up “with the smell of death.”
Raised in Brooklyn, Ginsburg was molded largely by her mother, who had graduated from high school at 15. Her mother never went to college, instead taking a job to help her oldest brother through Cornell University.
Ginsburg graduated near the top of her class from Brooklyn’s James Madison High School.
She attended Cornell, where on a blind date she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg. She later said he was the first boy she ever dated who cared about what was in her head.
After graduation, Martin Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School while Ruth completed her senior year, graduating first in her class in 1954.
After Martin’s Army discharge in 1956, the couple went to Cambridge, where Ruth also enrolled in Harvard Law, one of nine women in a class of more than 500.
Ginsburg was an academic star at Harvard. She earned top grades and a spot on the law review. But crisis soon invaded her life once again when her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Martin eventually recovered and after graduation snagged a job at a New York firm. In 1958, Ruth transferred from Harvard to Columbia Law School to complete her legal training. There, she continued to thrive, again making the law review and tying for first in her class at graduation in 1959.
Once she started looking for work, she could not find a job at New York’s top firms.
“I struck out on three grounds — I was Jewish, a woman and a mother,” Ginsburg reflected later. “The first raised one eyebrow; the second, two; the third made me indubitably inadmissible.”
Eventually, she landed a position as a clerk for a federal district court judge, after a Columbia law professor lined up a man as a replacement in the event Ginsburg faltered.
After her clerkship, Ginsburg signed on for a summer fellowship to study the legal system in Sweden. The six weeks in Stockholm proved to be an awakening, as she was thrust into the midst of that country’s burgeoning debate about gender roles in raising families.
Martin, a tax expert and later a Georgetown University Law School instructor died in 2010.
In 1963, Ginsburg became the second woman to join the faculty at New Jersey’s Rutgers Law School.
In 1972, Ginsburg became the first woman hired with tenure at Columbia Law School. Around that time, she also became the first director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.
At the ACLU, Ginsburg led a team of lawyers that brought six cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1979. They won five, victories that eventually altered the nation’s legal terrain by establishing that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial minorities but to women as well.
Her early victories at the Supreme Court prompted President Jimmy Carter to appoint her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980.
Clinton announced her nomination on June 14, 1993. She was confirmed just over two months later by a 96-to-3 vote.
During her court tenure, Justice Ginsburg had several bouts with cancer, although she never missed a day of the court’s public schedule.
Ginsburg is survived by her children and four grandchildren.