Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1933 – 2020 · United States
Known for: Supreme Court justice who won women their constitutional equality
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
Biography
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn on March 15, 1933, the second daughter of a Jewish emigrant from Odesa and of a mother who took her to the library every week and died of cancer the day before Ruth finished high school. She went on to Cornell University, graduated in 1954 as the highest ranking woman in her class, married Martin Ginsburg a month later, and was demoted from a government office in Oklahoma as soon as she became pregnant. She entered Harvard Law School in 1956 as one of nine women among some five hundred men, transferred to Columbia, and finished there sharing first place in her class.
Law firms would not hire a young mother, so she began in research and teaching. A Columbia project on international procedure took her to Sweden, where she learned the language, wrote a book on civil procedure with Anders Bruzelius, and found a society already arguing openly about the place of women. She taught at Rutgers and then at Columbia, the first woman on its law faculty to be granted tenure. Through the 1970s she served the American Civil Liberties Union as a volunteer attorney and general counsel, taking cases to the Supreme Court one at a time, some of them brought by men, to show the justices that laws sorting people by sex did harm in both directions. Jimmy Carter appointed her to the federal appeals court in Washington in 1980, and in 1993 Bill Clinton named her to the Supreme Court, where she was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to sit.
On the Court she wrote for the majority in United States v. Virginia, which in 1996 ended the men only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute. For three years after Sandra Day O'Connor retired in 2006 she was the only woman on the bench, and her dissents grew sharper: her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007 called on Congress to rewrite the law on pay discrimination, and in 2009 it did. She came through cancer twice and declined to step down in 2013 or 2014, when a Democratic president and Senate could have chosen her successor. Ginsburg died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at her home in Washington on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87. Her seat was filled thirty nine days later, but the law she had argued into being, in which the state may not assign roles by sex, outlasted the quarrel over her chair.