Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Nathan Bader, a furrier and haberdasher, and Celia Amster Bader ^[1]. The family lived in the Flatbush neighborhood, and Ruth attended James Madison High School, where she excelled academically. Her mother, who had gone to work at fifteen so that her brother could attend college, pressed Ruth to be independent and to value learning above almost everything else ^[4].

Celia Bader died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation in 1950, a loss Ginsburg described throughout her life as formative ^[5]. That autumn Ruth entered Cornell University on a scholarship. At Cornell she studied government, encountered the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as a writing teacher, and met Martin Ginsburg, a fellow student she married in 1954, shortly after finishing her degree at the top of the women in her class ^[1].

Any Ruth Bader Ginsburg biography has to reckon with how narrow the openings for women were at midcentury. When she enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of only nine women in a class of roughly five hundred, and the dean famously asked the women to justify taking places that could have gone to men ^[5]. She served on the Harvard Law Review while caring for a young daughter and helping her husband through cancer treatment, then transferred to Columbia Law School when Martin took a job in New York. She graduated in 1959, tied for first in her class ^[2].

Despite her record, no New York law firm offered Ginsburg a position, and Justice Felix Frankfurter declined to consider her for a clerkship because she was a woman ^[5]. She clerked instead for Judge Edmund Palmieri of the federal district court in Manhattan from 1959 to 1961, then joined a Columbia project on international procedure that took her to Sweden, where she studied the Swedish legal system and observed a society debating women's roles far more openly than her own ^[4].

In 1963 she became a professor at Rutgers Law School, one of the very few women then teaching law in the United States. She hid her second pregnancy under loose clothing, fearing for her contract ^[5]. Students and ACLU referrals began bringing her sex discrimination complaints, and the subject gradually became her specialty. In 1972 she was appointed the first tenured woman on the law faculty at Columbia, and the same year she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union ^[6].

Her litigation strategy was deliberate and incremental. Rather than asking the Supreme Court to sweep away discriminatory laws all at once, she selected cases that exposed how sex-based rules harmed identifiable people, sometimes men. In Reed v. Reed (1971) she wrote the brief that persuaded the Court, for the first time, to strike down a state law for discriminating against women under the Equal Protection Clause ^[3]. In Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), her first oral argument before the justices, she challenged unequal military benefits, and in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975) she won Social Security benefits for a widowed father, showing that stereotypes about caregiving injured men too ^[6].

Between 1971 and 1979 Ginsburg argued six sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and prevailed in five, a record that placed her among the most consequential advocates of the twentieth century ^[2]. Legal historians often compare her role in gender equality law to Thurgood Marshall's role in dismantling racial segregation, since both built doctrine case by case before joining the bench themselves ^[5].

President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, where she developed a reputation as a careful, consensus-minded judge over thirteen years ^[8]. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Byron White. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 96 to 3, and she became the second woman, after Sandra Day O'Connor, and the first Jewish woman to sit on the Court ^[1].

Among the most cited Ruth Bader Ginsburg achievements on the bench is her 1996 majority opinion in United States v. Virginia, which held that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women and that any sex-based government classification requires an exceedingly persuasive justification ^[3]. Her dissents proved influential as well. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007) she read her dissent from the bench and urged Congress to fix a pay discrimination rule; Congress responded with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first bill President Obama signed into law ^[5]. Her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), on the Voting Rights Act, became one of the best known judicial opinions of the era ^[7].

Ruth and Martin Ginsburg were married for fifty-six years, until his death in 2010, and their partnership was unusual for its time. Martin, a prominent tax lawyer and later a Georgetown professor, handled the family cooking, promoted his wife's career openly, and lobbied energetically for her Supreme Court nomination ^[4]. They raised two children: Jane, who became a law professor at Columbia, and James, who founded a classical music record label ^[1].

Ginsburg was devoted to opera and appeared as a supernumerary in productions in Washington. Her close friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite, was grounded in shared love of the art form and mutual respect; the two families celebrated New Year's Eve together for years, and an opera titled Scalia/Ginsburg was written about them ^[5].

She was known for a disciplined, almost austere work ethic, often writing through the night, and for a twice-weekly training routine with a personal trainer that continued into her eighties. Collections of her workout regimen and her jabots, the decorative collars she wore over her robe, became part of her public identity, though colleagues emphasized that her precision with legal text mattered far more to her than celebrity ^[7].

Ginsburg survived colorectal cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009, returning to the bench quickly after both treatments and famously missing almost no oral arguments across her tenure ^[5]. After Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010 she became the senior member of the Court's liberal wing, a position that gave her the power to assign dissents and made her voice more prominent.

In the 2010s a new generation adopted her as a cultural symbol. A law student's blog dubbed her the Notorious RBG, borrowing from the rapper Notorious B.I.G., and the nickname spread to books, documentaries, merchandise, and a 2018 feature film about her early career ^[7]. Some observers pressed her to retire while President Obama could name a successor; she declined, saying she intended to serve as long as she could do the job at full steam ^[5].

Her final years brought repeated cancer diagnoses, including lung cancer surgery in 2018 and treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer in 2019 and 2020. She continued to participate in cases, at times from a hospital bed by telephone. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020, at her home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 87 ^[3].

Ginsburg became the first woman in American history to lie in state at the United States Capitol, after also lying in repose at the Supreme Court, honors that reflected her standing well beyond the legal profession ^[5]. Her death weeks before a presidential election set off a fierce political contest over her successor, and Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the seat the following month.

The doctrinal change she engineered endures in every equal protection case involving sex. Basic Ruth Bader Ginsburg facts tell part of the story: six arguments before the Supreme Court, thirteen years on the D.C. Circuit, twenty-seven years as a justice. The larger point is that the constitutional standard now applied to laws that classify by sex exists largely because of the arguments she constructed in the 1970s and the opinions she wrote after 1993 ^[2].

Her influence also runs through the generations of lawyers, many of them women, who cite her as the reason they entered the profession. Law schools, scholarship programs, and public buildings now carry her name, and her instruction to fight for the things you care about, but in a way that leads others to join you, is quoted constantly in commencement addresses ^[1]. Few American judges have shaped the law so thoroughly both before and after putting on the robe.