U.S. Supreme Court loses its liberal leader
COMPLICATIONS Of METASTATIC PANCREATIC CANCER
ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose 27-year tenure as the second female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court culminated a legal career dedicated to advancing the rights of women, has died.
She was 87, and her death less than two months before the election gives U.S. President Donald Trump a chance to try to shift the already conservative court further to the right.
Ginsburg died due to complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer and was surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, the court said in a statement Friday.
Her health had been a top-ofmind concern at the court and throughout Washington in recent years. Ginsburg battled with five bouts of cancer, most recently liver lesions that she described as a recurrence of a previous episode.
“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement. “Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Trump now has a chance for a third high court appointment, which would boost Republican appointees’ majority to 6-3, potentially increasing the chances of a decision overturning or severely curtailing the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion. The current court has often divided 5-4 on ideological grounds in major cases. The Affordable Care Act would be another target for a more conservative court.
Long before president Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993, Ginsburg argued cases before the Supreme 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 court’s most liberal members, supporting gay and abortion rights, President Barack 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.”
She drew criticism during the 2016 presidential campaign when she denounced Trump as a “faker.” Ginsburg later said she regretted the comments. Trump called on her to resign, saying on Twitter that “her mind is shot.”
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.
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.
Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-1 decision in 1996 that ended the men-only 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.
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 gay marriage nationwide. She voted in two cases to uphold key provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
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.”
Ginsburg was one of the most durable justices in history. Before the liver tumour, she had contracted colon, lung and on two occasions pancreatic cancer. Until 2019, when she was recovering from surgery to remove masses from one of her lungs, Ginsburg never missed an argument because of illness.
Ruth Joan Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Nathan Bader, owned clothing stores. Her mother, the former Celia Amster, died of cervical cancer when Ruth was 17.
At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, she had a blind date with a classmate, Martin Ginsburg, and found him to be, as she later said, “the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain.” They married after she graduated, first in her class, in 1954.
Ginsburg joined her husband as a student at Harvard Law School and finished at the top of her class at Columbia Law School.
“The traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews,” she later wrote. “But to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot — that combination was a bit too much.”
Ginsburg and her husband, who died in 2010, had two children, Jane, a professor at Columbia Law School, and James, a producer of classical music recordings.