Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, and died on September 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C. She was a lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1993 until her death. President Bill Clinton nominated her to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time, she was seen as a moderate who could build consensus. She was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor. During her tenure, she wrote the majority opinions in cases like *United States v. Virginia* (1996), *Olmstead v. L.C.* (1999), *Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc.* (2000), and *City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York* (2005). Later in her time on the bench, she became known for passionate dissents that reflected liberal views of the law.

Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. Her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at age six when Ginsburg was just over a year old. Her mother, Celia, died the day before Ginsburg’s high school graduation. Celia had been a strong student but could not attend college because her family sent her brother instead; she wanted her daughter to become a high school history teacher. Ginsburg attended James Madison High School. She then went to Cornell University, where she studied under novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whom she later credited as a major influence on her writing. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government in 1954, was the highest-ranking female student in her class, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She married Martin D. Ginsburg a month after graduation. They moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and she had a child before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class. She transferred to Columbia Law School, graduating tied for first in her class. In the early 1960s, she worked on the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, learned Swedish, and co-authored a book with Swedish jurist Anders Bruzelius; her time in Sweden deeply influenced her thinking on gender equality. She later taught civil procedure at Rutgers Law School and then Columbia Law School, becoming one of the few women in the field and the first female professor at Columbia Law to earn tenure.

For much of her legal career, Ginsburg advocated for gender equality and women’s rights, winning many arguments before the Supreme Court. She volunteered as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, served on its board, and was one of its general counsel in the 1970s. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served until her Supreme Court appointment in 1993. From Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement in 2006 until Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment in 2009, Ginsburg was the only female justice on the Court. During that time, her dissents became more forceful, as in the 2007 case *Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.*.

Despite two bouts with cancer and public pleas from liberal law scholars, Ginsburg decided not to retire in 2013 or 2014, when President Barack Obama and a Democratic-controlled Senate could have appointed and confirmed her successor. She died at her home in Washington, D.C., at age 87, from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. The vacancy was filled 39 days later by Amy Coney Barrett. This appointment was one of three major rightward shifts on the Court since 1953, following Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall in 1991 and Warren Burger replacing Earl Warren in 1969.