Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Brooklyn, 15 March 1933 – Washington DC, 18 September 2020)
Nominated to the US Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as an associate justice from 10 August 1993 until her death on 18 September 2020. At the time of her death, she was one of just four women – together with Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kegan – to have been part of the court. She is also known for her advocacy of gender equality and women’s rights, successfully arguing several cases before the Supreme Court she would later join.
Ginsburg earned her bachelor’s degree in government at Cornell University in New York, where she was the top-ranking woman in her graduating class. There, she also met her future husband, Martin D. Ginsburg. In 1956, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only 9 women in a class of 500 men. When her husband was offered a job in New York, she moved there, transferring to Columbia Law School, where she graduated as co-valedictorian in 1959.
From 1961 to 1963, Ginsburg was a research associate for a project on international procedure at Columbia Law School. From 1963 to 1972, she worked as a professor at Rutgers Law School. In 1972, she became the first tenured woman professor at Colombia Law School, where she taught until 1980. She co-authored the first Colombia Law School casebook on gender discrimination. In 1970, she also co-founded the first US law journal to focus exclusively on women’s rights.
As for her advocacy and litigation in defence of gender equality, in 1972, she co-founded the women’s rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), becoming its general counsel the next year. By 1974, she had participated in more than 300 gender discrimination cases and won five of the six cases that she argued before the Supreme Court. Rather than calling for an end to gender discrimination in general, she followed a strategy based on highlighting specific discriminatory statutes and building on each victory. To this end, she chose laws that, whilst at first glance seemed to benefit women, actually reinforced their dependence on men. Her work led to the end of gender discrimination in many areas of law. She left a particularly strong mark in the cases Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), Moritz v. Commissioner (1972), Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636 (1975), Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976) and Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357 (1979).
She continued to work on the ACLU’s women’s rights project until 1980, when she was nominated to a seat as a federal judge on the DC circuit appeals court. She remained in the position until 14 June 1993, when President Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court. She became the court’s second woman and first Jewish woman associate justice. Her opinions positioned her on the Court’s ‘liberal wing’, and she argued that the liberal dissenting justices should present a unified front ‘with one voice’. She wrote opinions such as United States v. Virginia (1996), Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) and Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. (2000). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Willamette University (2009), Princeton University (2010) and Harvard University (2011), amongst others.
Her refusal to retire and forceful dissents led to widespread media coverage, eventually making her a pop culture icon and earning her the nicknames ‘the Notorious RBG’ and ‘RBG’. Both she and her work have been the subject of several films and books.
Academic bibliography:
Text, Cases, and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1974
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 300 Statements der berühmten Supreme-Court-Richterin - Herausgegeben von Helena Hunt. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2020
Bibliography on her life and positions:
Raising the Bar: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Amy Leigh Campbell i Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2003
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Irin Carmon i Shana Knizhnik, 2015
My Own Words. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2016
I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark. Debbie Levy, 2016
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Jane De Hart, 2018
Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. Jeffrey Rosen, 2019
I Know This To Be True. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: On Equality, Determination, and Service. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2020
Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue. A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union. Ruth Bader Ginsburg i Amanda L. Tyler, 2021
Films and plays:
Comic opera: Scalia/Ginsburg. Derrick Wang, 2015
Documentary: RBG. Betsy West and Julie Cohen, 2018
Film: On the Basis of Sex. Directed by Mimi Leder, 2018
Documentary: Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words. Directed by Freida Lee Mock, 2019