Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court and feminist icon, who attained rock star status late in life for her withering dissents as leader of the liberal wing of the court, died on Friday at the age of 87. Her death from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer sets up a fierce battle over the future of the court as the United States races towards a presidential election.
Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents hailing from KrakĆ³w and Odessa, Joan Ruth Bader suffered the loss of an older sister in infancy and her mother, Celia, the day before her high school graduation, subsequently attending Cornell University where she graduated with a bachelor of arts in government.
At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg, who she married one month after graduation, demoted from her job at the Social Security office in Oklahoma when she became pregnant with the couple’s first child. Ginsburg then enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in a class of hundreds, transferring to Columbia where she tied for first in class when she graduated in 1959 with a law degree.
At the discretion of her former professors, Ginsburg served a two year clerkship for Judge Edmund Palmieri of the Southern District of New York, before returning to Columbia. She learned Swedish and visited Lund University as co-author of a comparative study on civil procedure, and in 1963 took her first position as professor at Rutgers Law School. In 1970, Ginsburg co-headed the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the United States which focused exclusively on women’s rights, and in 1972 she became the first director of the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Under the auspices of the ACLU, Ginsburg argued a series of gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, sometimes targeting male plaintiffs to highlight the diverse and encompassing inequalities which existed between men and women.
She filed briefs in the landmark cases Reed v. Reed, which ruled that administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates based on sex; Frontiero v. Richardson, which ruled that the United States military cannot issue benefits based on sex; and Craig v. Boren, which challenged an Oklahoma statute setting a higher legal drinking age for men, for the first time making statutory classifications based on sex subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
At the same time Ginsburg took up a professorship at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman. In 1980 as the federal judiciary was expanded under President Carter, Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
It was her reputation as a moderate consensus builder in the District of Columbia, working alongside colleagues like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, which made her a winning choice for the Supreme Court under President Clinton in 1993: in fact among the small number of dissenting voices were abortion activists, angered by a speech Ginsburg had made earlier that year which suggested a narrower scope in the decision Roe v. Wade might have spared twenty years of growing division. Expressing her support for abortion and equal rights while deferring on other constitutional matters, Ginsburg was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3, becoming the second female and first Jewish justice.
Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the landmark case United States v. Virginia in 1996, which struck down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute. The period 1994 to 2005 saw the same nine judges serve, the longest stretch in Supreme Court history, but by 2006 the court had shifted once more to the right. As the senior Democratic appointee, Ginsburg became known for her dissenting opinions.
Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 2007 ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pay discrimination claims must be made within 180 days of an employer’s discriminatory conduct, in this case from the date of the plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter’s first unequal paycheck. Objecting that the statutory 180-day period should only begin once a claimant becomes aware of the discrimination, Ginsburg called on Congress to clarify Title VII. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Play Act of 2009, which resets the statutory clock upon each new discriminatory paycheck, became the first bill signed into law by President Obama.
A further dissent came over Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which declared unconstitutional the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requiring states to receive federal approval before changing voting practises. Ginsburg responded, ‘Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet’.
One of her favourite decisions remained M.L.B. v. S.L.J., which ruled that an inability to pay court fees should not limit the right of appeal in parental rights cases, whileĀ she lamented her decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York which denied tribal sovereignty to repurchased tribal lands, making partial amends earlier this year when she joined the majority for McGirt v. Oklahoma.
Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, but rebounded with the help of a personal trainer and never missed a day on the bench. She again underwent surgery, this time for pancreatic cancer, in 2009. By 2014 when she received a coronary stent to clear a blocked artery, some pundits were questioning whether she should make way for a Democratic replacement. By 2018 when she fell and fractured three ribs, hailed as a bastion of liberalism amid the rightward tilt of the Trump administration, support poured in for the popularly characterised Notorious R.B.G.
A CT scan of her ribs showed the early stages of lung cancer, and Ginsburg underwent surgery hours before casting a decisive vote blocking an executive ban on asylum. Pancreatic cancer returned in the summer of 2019 and again earlier this year. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was swiftly embroiled in matters of congressional ethics and talk of potential successors, as tributes were paid to an outstanding legacy on the grounds of the Supreme Court and across the political aisle.
