RBG 1933-2020
Pioneering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court, on Friday lost her battle to pancreatic cancer. The passing undoubtedly will set up a fierce DC battle to fill her seat.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the unrelenting trailblazer for gender equality and the second woman appointed to the High Court, died Friday night. She was 87.
Ginsburg died surrounded by family at her home in Washington, DC, due to complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court said in a statement Friday night.
“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
“We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague.”
The small-but-mighty Brooklyn-born jurist had clawed her way through the male-dominated legal industry early in her career and shattered gender norms as a pioneer for women’s rights in the 1970s.
She argued six landmark cases before the Supreme Court and was victorious in five of them that led to fairer treatment of women, as well as men.
In her 25 years on the High Court, the outspoken octogenarian unexpectedly earned a cult following — and the nickname “Notorious RBG” for her scathing dissenting opinions.
Born on March 15, 1933, Joan Ruth Bader grew up in Flatbush, the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a Russian Jew who immigrated to the United States in his teens, and Celia Bader (née Amster), whose parents were Polish immigrants.
Some of the future judge’s earliest memories include trips with her mother to a cramped Brooklyn Public Library branch off Kings Highway that sat above a Chinese restaurant. The bright young student, who graduated from James Madison HS in 1950, went on to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School.
She and Martin “Marty” Ginsburg were married in 1954. The couple had two children, Jane and James. Marty, just one year older, was the first boy Ginsburg dated “who cared that I had a brain,” she recalled in the 2018 CNN documentary “RBG.”
At Harvard, RBG was one of nine women in a class of more than 500. “You felt you were constantly on display,” she said in the documentary. “So if you were called on in class, you felt that if you didn’t perform well, you were failing not just for yourself but all women.”
She twice landed on the prestigious law reviews at top schools — first at Harvard and then at Columbia Law, where she transferred in 1958 after Marty, who died in 2010, scored a job in Manhattan.
Despite her glowing academic
Both sides of the political aisle mourned the loss of historic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday — even as they prepared to battle over her vacant seat on the bench.
“She led an amazing life, what else can you say? She was an amazing woman, whether you agreed or not. She was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m actually saddened to hear that.”
— President Trump, immediately on hearing of Ginburg’s death
“President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
— Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, vowing to hold a confirmation hearing as soon as the president nominates a successor for Ginsburg’s seat.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, parroting the exact words McConnell had used in refusing to hold a confirmation hearing on President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the vacant seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died nine months before the 2016 presidential election
“Just so there is no doubt, let me be clear: The voters should pick a president and that president should pick the justices for the Senate to consider. This is the position that the United States Senate took in 2016. That’s the position the United States Senate should take today.”
— Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden
achievements, no one would hire the young lawyer due to her gender.
In 1960 she was rejected for a clerkship with thenSupreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who told the professor who recommended her that he wasn’t ready to hire a woman.
“I became a lawyer in days when women were not wanted by most members of the legal profession, because Marty and his parents supported that choice unreservedly,” she said years later at her Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
As the first tenured woman professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, Ginsburg embarked on a career of fighting gender inequality. She and other women employees at the school sued after learning they were paid substantially less than male counterparts.
The women won — and that led to Ginsburg teaming up with the American Civil Liberties Union to handle sex-discrimination cases and launching its Women’s Rights Project in 1972.
In 1980, Ginsburg went from arguing cases — to deciding them.
As a judge on the Washington, DC Circuit of the Court of Appeals, she penned more than 700 opinions over 13 years.
Ginsburg’s ascent to the Supreme Court came in 1993 when she was tapped by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring Justice Byron White.
Ginsburg was the second woman behind Sandra Day O’Connor to be appointed to the Supreme Court. In the following years, she was joined on the bench by fellow New Yorkers Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.