by Allison Lee
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her near-three decades of serving as Supreme Court Justice, has become universally acclaimed as a champion for gender equality, a feminist icon, a pop-culture symbol, and the face of justice. Frequently compared with Thurgood Marshall, no other American lawyer has managed to scale such heights in the legalverse.
Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, the Justice would chart a course for the women of the United States throughout her career, but first, we have to travel back to her early years.
To help differentiate herself from other children named ‘Joan’, Ginsburg started going by ‘Ruth’ at school, where she excelled greatly as a student and was even a twirler. The day before her high school graduation, however, tragedy struck—Ginsburg’s mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer. In her later years, the Justice would say that the loss of her mother strengthened her will to live the life her mother only dreamt of.
Ginsburg grew up at the height of the Great Depression; bearing witness to the McCarthy hearings and the Rosenbergs’ electrocutions, she saw how the government would target the vulnerable and was determined to become a lawyer, a profession which would allow her to represent the everyday people.
At just seventeen, Ginsburg rode a full scholarship to Cornell University for her undergraduate degree in government, where she met the love of her life, Martin ‘Marty’ Ginsburg, on a blind date. “What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” Ginsburg commented.
After she graduated from Cornell, she and Marty tied the knot and uprooted to Oklahoma for Marty’s military service. There in Fort Sill, Ginsburg was denied many job opportunities in spite of her high scores and had to settle for being a typist. When she became pregnant with her daughter Jane, she lost her job because her employers thought she would be too preoccupied with familial matters. Years later, when she would carry her son James, Ginsburg tried to conceal her pregnancy for fear of history repeating itself.
In 1956, Ginsburg became one out of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, her whole class composed of around 500 students. The Law School had only recently started accepting women, and the dean infamously asked Ginsburg and her eight other female peers at a dinner party to justify taking a man’s place at Harvard. The discrimination she faced at Harvard was not the toughest part; Marty was later diagnosed with testicular cancer, leaving Ginsburg to attend both their classes, all while raising her daughter. Thankfully, her hard work and grit paid off when she was named to Harvard Law Review.
During her final year of law school, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School following Marty, who was employed as a tax lawyer in New York. This move was one of her few historic accomplishments, making her the first woman to work at both college’s law reviews.
Ginsburg completed her law degree with flourishing results, tying for top of her class, and excelling in every aspect. In today’s world, the law firm giants would be fighting tooth and nail over hiring her, but that wasn’t the case in the 1960s. As she sought to kickstart her legal career, Justice Frankfurter closed the doors on her for a clerkship position before she was even interviewed, solely because Ginsburg was a woman. Though her records showed that she was equally as suitable—if not, more so—than her male colleagues for employment, opportunities in the legal world were made unavailable to her. “Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” Ginsburg said, “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman, and a mother.”
Soon after, Ginsburg landed a job teaching law. Though her life was moving toward an unplanned trajectory, her teaching job would serve her well. “The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s. There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change,” Ginsburg told NPR.
When the 1970s came around, Ginsburg spearheaded a radical project to dismantle the functional differences between men and women and the stereotypical roles each of them was branded with. She litigated case after case in regards to sex discrimination, the foundation for her legal career hinged on “there shouldn’t be ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’”.
Ginsburg was quick to think on her feet; she knew she had to present her cases in front of male judges, so she took on male social security cases to enunciate the fact that discrimination against women would harm men too.
In Reed v. Reed (1971), Ginsburg wrote her first Supreme Court brief, begging the question “Should men be preferred over women as estate executors?”. An extract of the brief reads: “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognize the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.” Ginsburg’s brief won her the agreement of the court, setting a milestone for the first time the court had struck down a law on grounds of sex discrimination.
Ginsburg co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1972, a project which, in the span of two years, would become involved in hundreds of gender discrimination cases across the country. In the same year, Ginsburg was granted tenure at Columbia Law School, becoming the first female professor to ever achieve this.
Another remarkable case in Ginsburg’s career came about in 1975. Representing Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife had died in childbirth and was subsequently denied benefits because only widows—not widowers—were eligible for Social Security payments, Ginsburg argued that the law unconstitutionally made assumptions of the roles of fathers and mothers in the household.
She famously noted: “Laws of this quality help to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.” This case has testified how unfairness toward women would ultimately come back and bite men in the back, such is the case of Wiesenfeld not getting the payment that would enable him to spend more time with his child. Needless to say, Ginsburg won the case.
Succeeding numerous cases and decades of fighting for the people, Ginsburg was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Her continuous legal crusade for gender equality was what led to her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Adding to the multitude of milestones she had already accomplished in her life, Ginsburg became the second woman confirmed to the bench by a 96-3 vote after Sandra Day O’Connor.
Clinton’s administration said that Ginsburg’s name in the shortlist of Supreme Court nominees was made possible by Marty’s constant lobbying. It was no secret that the Ginsburgs had a love to be envied, with Marty being Ruth’s number one fan, championing her at all times. Marty once said that the most important thing he did with his life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.
From 1993 up to her death on September 18, 2020, Ginsburg served twenty-seven years on America’s highest court, defying all social conventions and emerging as the most valuable member. She was involved in many landmark cases on the bench, carrying on the fight for equality not just for women but for minority groups.
Ginsburg fought especially relentlessly for the LGBTQ+ community; she ruled in favor of equality in every case that had to do with queer issues, insisting that the criminalization of homosexuality was unconstitutional. In the 1996 case Romer v. Evans, a state amendment was passed prohibiting the recognition of the queer community as a protected class. The majority, along with Ginsburg, found earlier rulings to devalue the LGBTQ+ persons and deemed the amendment unconstitutional.
The Justice was also known for her feisty dissents; in 2009, she wrote in defense of Lilly Ledbetter, a former employee of Goodyear Tires who realized she was paid significantly less relative to her male counterparts. Ledbetter’s case was reversed on appeal because she had failed to file action within 180 days. Ginsburg’s statement yielded a response from Congress, who passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, stating that the 180-day clock would restart every time a discriminatory paycheck was issued.
Throughout her legal career, Justice Ginsburg had five run-ins with cancer and lost Marty to cancer in 2010, but none of them stopped her from making public appearances or attending to her work. Her radical project and strong will to see true change in her country sustained her through the health scares and the losses, supplying her with unmatched energy to serve the law and the people.
Ginsburg went against all the stereotypes and restrictions set by society for women; she ventured where few have gone and trailblazed a whole new future for women. She went to law school, overturned precedents, rode horses, dissented rulings, and even Marty acknowledged that she was an awful cook. She pioneered a new future for the women of America as a fierce fighter who had never allowed the opinion of a man to hold her back.
There are many ways to describe the Justice. Some say she was the giant of American jurisprudence despite her short stature, others define her as a resolute and fierce defender of justice. Beyond her oversized glasses and soft voice, no one would’ve guessed that this woman would shred stereotypes and pave the way for women to be treated as equal to men, but oh, was she smart and wise beyond her years.
As she entered her eighties with no plans for retirement, Ginsburg even became a pop-culture icon; thanks to a law student’s Tumblr account dedicated to her, named ‘Notorious RBG’, an homage to the late rapper The Notorious BIG. She had a documentary depicting her life and a Hollywood biopic called ‘On The Basis Of Sex’ which stars Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer. The Justice even had an opera written for and about her!
Against all odds—the sexism and criticisms—she took one case at a time and ascended to the apex of her career.
“I do think that I was born under a very bright star… because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. I was not nominated to the vacancy in the second circuit, instead I was nominated to the D.C. circuit, much better place for me to be because it makes more important decisions about what’s going on in our government,” she said.
Days before her passing, Ginsburg dictated to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died due to complications from pancreatic cancer at 87-years-old surrounded by her loved ones. Once the news spread, White House and Supreme Court flags were lowered to half-staff to mourn her passing, joined by hundreds who showed up to the Court to pay their respects. The world took to internet platforms to share their tributes, honoring the liberal icon.
Ginsburg continued to hit milestones after she had passed; the justice is the first woman in the country’s history to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol, following a private ceremony where her family and closest colleagues attended.
President Trump, however, is of the opinion that a strategic replacement of Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court could potentially swing votes in his favor; forecasts show that appointing a female justice would boost his standing among women.
This defiance of Ginsburg’s last and only wish has enraged many; when Trump visited the late justice’s coffin outside the Supreme Court on September 24, he was met with jeers from the crowd who had clustered to pay their respects to Ginsburg, along with chants of ‘vote him out’.
On September 26, Trump announced that his choice for replacing Ginsburg is federal judge Amy Coney Barrett. This spelled trouble for many things since Barrett holds beliefs that are pro-life, she criticizes stare decisis, and on the seventh circuit, she has a track record for ruling in favor of the wealthy in cases against everyday people and being hostile toward the LGBTQ+ community. Many believe that Barrett, once secured on the bench, will permanently close up doors that Ginsburg had fought relentlessly to open for the American people.
It is imperative that the causes Ginsburg advocated for are not overturned to set people back a couple of decades. A key pillar of her legal career was showing how, as societies grow, the laws have to change to accommodate that growth. She has set the foundation for a better America, and continuing her work is the only way to honor the legacy of the Notorious RBG.
RBG’s story is a tale to be sung for ages to come; hers is a truly empowering story that tells young girls they can achieve more than they could dream of so long as they put their mind and heart to it, never mind what a man says. And maybe, just maybe, that is her greatest legacy.