Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, history-making jurist, and national treasure, dies aged 87

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, died on Friday at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 87.

The cause was complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court said.

“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence, that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader and grew up in a low-income, working-class neighborhood. Her mother, Celia, was a major influence on her life, instilling the importance of independence and education.

Ginsburg married Marin D Ginsburg the year she earned her B.A. at Cornell University in 1954. She went on to Harvard Law school, where she became the first female member of the Harvard Law Review.

She transferred to Columbia Law School, where she was elected to the school’s law review and graduated first in her class in 1959. She later taught at Rutgers University Law School and Columbia Law School, where she became the first female tenured professor.

In 1980, President Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where she served until her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993. She was selected by Bill Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in a 96-3 vote.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her legal career in 1959, society, including state and federal legislation, regarded women in the United States as second-class citizens. Women were barred from countless professions, frequently denied access to education, and paid substantially less than men—who did the same work openly and legally.

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and became the Project’s general counsel in 1973. The Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU participated in over 300 gender discrimination cases by 1974.

Ginsburg and the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project persuaded the court to apply heightened scrutiny to laws that discriminate because of sex. This rule ended lawmakers’ ability to justify using sexist stereotypes to exclude women from full participation in the economy and government. The court acknowledged, in 1973, that such “romantic paternalism” had the “practical effect” of putting women “not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

Later in life, Ginsburg would say that she did not fight for “women’s rights,” but for “the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.” The justice understood constitutional equality was an ongoing project, and she spent her life expanding equal citizenship to all Americans

Her opinions were influential even on the losing side of a case. In a 2007 sex-discrimination case, she protested the conservative majority’s decision against Lilly Ledbetter, a woman who said that after 19 years at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co plant in Alabama, she made far less than men in the same work with similar tenure.

The court majority said such wage claims need to be filed within 180 days of the initial adverse action. Noting it took Ledbetter years to discover the salary disparity, Ginsburg said the court did not comprehend “the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

Two years later, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, effectively overturning the ruling, showing the power of her judicial opinion. A healthy court needs vigorous debate between justices and between the lawyers bringing cases before the court. Though Ginsburg spent much of her time in the minority position at the court, she remained optimistic. In 2019 Ginsburg reminded an audience in Little Rock, Arkansas of the Constitution’s opening line: “We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union.”

She then challenged her audience to consider how those words have changed over time.

“Think about how things were in 1787,” the justice said. “Who were ‘We the people’? Certainly not people who were held in human bondage, because the original Constitution preserves slavery. Certainly not women, whatever their color, and not even men who own no property. It was a rather elite group.” But over time, Ginsburg continued, “the concept of ‘We the people’ has become ever more inclusive,” growing to encompass “slaves, women, men without property, Native Americans.” Today, all these groups have won their right to participate in American democracy. And, the justice who made this her life’s work concluded, “we are certainly a more perfect union as a result of that.”

We are certainly a more perfect union as a result of her commitment to ensure justice for all of us.