SUPREME COURT’S LEGAL TRAILBLAZER
FIERCE ADVOCATE: A long career marked by fight for gender equality
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 Friday 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.
After Scalia’s death, the Senate took no action to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee to the court, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland. President Donald Trump, who took office in 2017, has nominated two new justices to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter succeeding Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., said Friday night that he would schedule a vote to confirm Trump’s nominee to succeed, giving Trump an opportunity to cement a rightward tilt of the Supreme Court for a generation.
With the election less than two months away, Mcconnell said the Senate would act to fill the vacancy, even though he spent most of 2016 denying a confirmation hearing for Garland.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said on Friday night that the vacancy should not be filled until after the presidential election.
“There is no doubt — let me be clear — that the voters should pick the president, and the president should pick the justice for the Senate to consider,” Biden told reporters after landing at New Castle Airport in Delaware following a campaign trip to Minnesota.
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.”
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 — her friend, Scalia, was the dissenter — 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 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 socalled partial-birth abortions. “The court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety,” 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.
In an interview with The Post in 2010, Ginsburg said the Ledbetter case struck a personal chord.
“Every woman of my age had a Lilly Ledbetter story,” she said. “And so we knew that the notion that a woman who is in a nontraditional job is going to complain the first time she thinks she is being discriminated against — the one thing she doesn’t want to do is rock the boat, to become known as a complainer.”
She called upon Congress to take action, and once Democrats were in control, it did. Obama signed the law relaxing the deadlines for filing suits.
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.
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 Flatbush, then a striving working-class neighborhood of Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, Ginsburg was molded largely by her mother, who had graduated from high school at 15.
Ginsburg attended Cornell, where on a blind date she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, a confident, fun-loving fraternity member and a standout on the university’s golf team. 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.
Those were the days of relentless grillings by professors using the Socratic method, a high-pressure situation made even more intense for female students by the prevailing view that they were operating in a realm where they did not belong.
Further complicating matters for Ginsburg as a Harvard student was the responsibility of being a new mother after the birth of her daughter, Jane. (Jane eventually attended Harvard Law as well, one year behind future Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.)
Through it all, Ginsburg was an academic star at Harvard. She earned top grades and a spot on the law review.
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.”
Her husband, Martin, a tax expert and later a Georgetown University Law School instructor died of cancer in 2010.