RUTH BADER GINSBURG: MOURNING A GIANT

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death Friday of complications of pancreatic cancer at age 87 pitched off a huge emotional reaction across America with no parallel in court history.

News of her death was sudden, the outpouring intense. Ginsburg first gained a reputation as a legal giant in the 1970s when she won sweeping constitutional protections against sex discrimination in five cases she argued before the Supreme Court while leading the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her efforts were personally informed by the patronizing treatment she received from male professors while studying law at Harvard and then Columbia and from male administrators while teaching law at Rutgers. Her core argument — that it was unconstitutional to treat women and men differently based on stereotypes of female servility and fragility — is now an accepted standard. “A gender line ... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage,” she observed.

Ginsburg's career had many parallels with that of the first African American justice, Thurgood Marshall, who was applauded for his many victories in civil rights cases before joining the Supreme Court in 1967. “Ruth Ginsburg was as responsible as any one person for legal advances that women made under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, on her nomination.

After she was chosen by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to be the second woman on the high court — and the first to be progressive — Ginsburg's stature kept growing until she emerged as a cultural icon, known as the Notorious RBG, revered by women of all ages. She was the subject of a 2018 documentary and a 2018 feature film and held public events at sports arenas because so many wanted to hear her talk. She was admired both for her determination to protect the interests of women and the downtrodden and for the grit and courage she showed in dealing with repeated bouts of cancer and other physical woes since 1999 and her husband's death in 2010.

But late in her career, after appointments by President George W. Bush strengthened the Supreme Court's conservative majority, Ginsburg's fiery dissents against decisions limiting access to contraceptives and narrowing the scope of the Affordable Care Act in ways that hurt women offered a reminder of why she came to prominence in the first place: the brilliance of her legal mind and her lifelong resistance to the idea that the law could treat men and women differently.

President Donald Trump and Senate Republican Leader Mitch Mcconnell have already signaled they will ignore the 2016 precedent in which the Senate GOP majority wouldn't even consider Judge Merrick Garland, nominated by President Barack Obama, because the decision should be left to the next president. The hypocrisy this displays is sure to lead to ugly political fights in coming days.

This is unavoidable, but it's also extremely sad — because it will distract attention from the late justice's glorious accomplishments and how she changed U.S. law for the fairer and better even before reaching the Supreme Court. America is a lesser place without Ruth Bader Ginsburg.