In 2019, a few days before an exam, I watched the movie “On the Basis of Sex” based on her life story. As a female Law student exhausted from the preparation of exams and on the brink of abandoning the study of Law. Her struggle, her perseverance and brilliance inspired me to do better. I said to myself “If she could do it with discrimination and the pressure to prove herself among so many men. You can do it too.”
Joan Ruth Bader was the younger of two children born to merchant Nathan Bader and Celia Bader. Joan was 14 months old when her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at the age of six. Ginsburg began using the name “Ruth” outside of her family in kindergarten to help her teachers distinguish her from other students named Joan. Ruth grew up in an observant Jewish family, and she attended synagogue and participated in Jewish traditions. She excelled in school, where she was active in student activities and received high grades.
Celia was diagnosed with cancer around the time Ruth started high school. She died of the disease four years later, just days before her 40th birthday. Ruth’s scheduled graduation ceremony, which she was unable to attend.
Ruth was admitted to Cornell University on a full scholarship. She met her future husband, Martin (“Marty”) Ginsburg, who was also a Cornell student, during her first semester. Martin, who went on to become a nationally recognized tax attorney, had a significant influence on Ruth because of his strong and consistent interest in her intellectual pursuits. She was also influenced by two other people she met at Cornell, both professors: author Vladimir Nabokov, who shaped her writing thinking, and constitutional lawyer Robert Cushman, who inspired her to pursue a legal career. Martin and Ruth married nine days after she graduated from Cornell in June 1954.
The Ginsburgs spent two years in Oklahoma after Martin was drafted into the United States Army. During this period, their first child, Jane, was born. The Ginsburgs then relocated to Massachusetts, where Martin resumed his studies at Harvard Law School and Ruth began hers. While Ruth finished her coursework and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review (the first woman to do so), she also cared for Martin, who had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. Martin graduated and accepted a job with a law firm in New York City after his recovery. Ruth earned her law degree at Columbia Law School, where she served on the law review and graduated in a tie for first place in her class in 1959.
Despite her excellent credentials, she had difficulty finding work as a lawyer because of her gender and the fact that she was a mother. At the time, women made up a very small percentage of the legal profession in the United States, and only two women had ever served as federal judges. However, one of Ginsburg’s Columbia law professors advocated for her and helped persuade Judge Edmund Palmieri of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to offer her a clerkship (1959–61). She studied Swedish civil procedure as an associate director of Columbia Law School’s Project on International Procedure (1962-63), and her research was eventually published in a book, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), co-written with Anders Bruzelius.
In 1963, she was hired as an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Law. Because of her husband’s well-paying job, she was advised by the school’s dean to accept a low salary. Ginsburg wore oversized clothes after becoming pregnant with the couple’s second child, a son, James, born in 1965, for fear that her contract would not be renewed. In 1969, she was given tenure at Rutgers.
Ginsburg became professionally involved in the issue of gender equality in 1970 when she was asked to introduce and moderate a panel discussion of law students on the topic of “women’s liberation.” In 1971, she published two articles in law review on the subject and gave a seminar on gender discrimination. Ginsburg collaborated with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases as part of the course. The first (brought originally) Her husband brought to her attention was a provision of the federal tax code that denied single men a tax deduction for caring for their families.
The second case involved an Idaho state law that explicitly preferred men over women in deciding who should administer the estates of people who died without leaving a will (see intestate succession). The decision in the latter case, Reed v. Reed (1971), was the first in which a gender-based statute was overturned under the equal protection clause.
Ginsburg was a key figure in gender discrimination litigation for the rest of the 1970s. In 1972, she became the founding counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and co-authored a casebook on gender discrimination for law students. In the same year, she became Columbia Law School’s first tenured female faculty member. She authored dozens of law review articles and drafted or contributed to several Supreme Court briefs on gender discrimination. During the decade, she argued six times before the Supreme Court, winning five of them.
Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Ginsburg earned a reputation as a pragmatic liberal with keen attention to detail while serving on the D.C. Circuit. She had friendly professional relationships with two well-known conservative Supreme Court justices, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, and frequently voted with them. In 1993, she gave birth. the Madison Lecture at New York University Law School, offering a critique of the reasoning—but not the ultimate holding—of Roe v. Wade (1973), the famous case in which the Supreme Court found that women have a constitutional right to choose abortion. Ginsburg argued that the Court should have issued a more limited decision, giving state legislatures more leeway to address specific details. She claimed that such an approach “might have served to reduce rather than fuel controversy.”
On June 14, 1993, Democratic U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton announced his nomination of Ginsburg to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Byron White.
Her confirmation hearings were brief and uncontroversial. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously supported her nomination. The full Senate confirmed him on August 3 by a vote of 96-3.
Ginsburg was known on the Court for her active participation in oral arguments and her habit of wearing jabots, or collars, with her judicial robes, some of which had symbolic meanings. She identified a majority-opinion collar as well as a dissent collar, for example. Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which held that a state-run university’s men-only admission policy, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), violated the equal protection clause. Rejecting VMI’s claim that its military-focused education program was unsuitable for women, Ginsburg pointed out that the program was unsuitable for the vast majority of Virginia college students. Students of all genders are welcome.
“generalizations about ‘the way women are,’ estimations of what is appropriate for the majority of women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description,” she wrote.
Although Ginsburg tended to vote with the Court’s other liberal justices, she got along well with the majority of the conservative justices appointed before her. She had a special relationship with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, and she and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia famously bonded over their shared love of opera (in fact, American composer-lyricist Derrick Wang wrote a successful comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, celebrating their relationship). She praised the first chief’s efforts. William Rehnquist, another conservative, was the justice with whom she worked.
Ginsburg, on the other hand, shared less in common with the majority of the justices appointed by Republican U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. Trump’s election victory renewed criticism of Ginsburg for not retiring during Obama’s presidency.
She remained on the Court as its senior justice, publicly remembering John Paul Stevens’ service until he died at the age of 90.
She died from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87.
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