Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Liberal Stalwart, Dies At 87
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal firebrand Supreme Court justice who became a
legal and feminist icon, died Friday.
By Beth Dalbey, Patch Staff
Sep 18, 2020 7:49 pm ET | Updated Sep 18, 2020 9:31 pm ET
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Liberal Stalwart, Dies At 87
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday at the age of 87 at her
home in Washington, D.C., of complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.
(Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Berggruen Institute )
WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who used her
position to fight gender discrimination and unify the court's liberal wing,
died of complications of metastatic pancreas cancer Friday at her home in
Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court said in a statement. She was 87.
"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."
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The diminutive-yet-formidable justice, known for snazzing up her staid black
robe with lavish collars and necklaces signaling how she would vote on key
issues before the court, showed her grit through four bouts with cancer.
Notably, she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery in 2018 when
she cast the deciding vote that doomed President Donald Trump’s proposed
immigrant asylum restrictions.
RELATED: 5 Things To Know About Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Life
Even the briefest mentions of her health had caused panic among America’s
liberals and progressives, who saw her as the bulwark between the repeal of
abortion rights and protections for women, a sharply conservative court, and
even the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution.
Her death is certain to ramp up campaigning over the makeup of the court in
advance of November's election and is expected to give President Trump a chance
to nominate another conservative justice.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement hours after
Ginsburg's death that he will allow the chamber to vote on a nominee put forth
by Trump — though in 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, he refused
to allow the Senate to consider former President Barack Obama's nominee,
Merrick Garland.
"In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans
elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance
the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise," he
said. "Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s
Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.
"By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018
because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda,
particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again,
we will keep our promise."
As her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated a statement to her granddaughter Clara
Spera that, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new
president is installed."
The flags over the Capitol were lowered to half staff "to honor the patriotism
of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg," House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a
statement. "Every woman and girl, and therefore every family, in America has
benefitted from her brilliance."
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state's "heart breaks with the passing of
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg."
"During her extraordinary career, this Brooklyn native broke barriers & the
letters RBG took on new meaning—as battle cry & inspiration," he wrote on
Twitter. "Her legal mind & dedication to justice leave an indelible mark on
America."
Former President George W. Bush said that during 87 years in pursuit of justice
and equality, Ginsburg "inspired more than one generation of women and girls."
"Justice Ginsburg loved our country and loved the law," he said in a statement.
"Laura and I are fortunate to have known this smart and humorous trailblazer,
and we send our condolences to the Ginsburg family."
Hillary Clinton, who served as first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state
before her unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, said the fiery justice "paved
the way for so many women, including me."
"There will never be another like her," she wrote on Twitter. "Thank you RBG."
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent who moved the Democratic party to
the left in two unsuccessful presidential bids, called Ginsburg's death "a
tremendous loss to our country."
"She was an extraordinary champion of justice and equal rights, and will be
remembered as one of the great justices in modern American history," he wrote
on Twitter.
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a titan of justice," former Democratic presidential
candidate Pete Buttigieg wrote on Twitter. "Her jurisprudence expanded the
rights of all Americans, shaping our lives for the better. And her example now
shines within the history of our country, there to inspire generations."
Ginsburg often made light of what had become an almost ritualistic “deathwatch”
among both her fans and critics.
“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced
with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator,
whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I,” she added with a
smile in the NPR interview, "am very much alive.”
For her part, Ginsburg worried little that a more-conservative court would
reduce gender protections she and others fought for so tirelessly. “The world
has changed,” she said in a 2019 interview with National Public Radio. “I don’t
think there’s any going back to the old ways.”
Lifelong Fight For Gender Equality
Capping a lifelong fight against gender discrimination, the “notorious RBG,” as
she was called, was only the second woman justice in U.S. history and the
court’s longest-serving female until her death. She brought to the bench the
clear and unwavering voice of a woman who had lived the history the court was
righting with landmark rulings that broke new ground for gender equality in the
United States.
As a first-year student at the male-dominated Harvard Law School in 1956 — she
was one of only nine women in her 500-member class, and the first ever to serve
on the Harvard Law Review — she was asked by a professor to justify taking the
place in a rigorous acceptance process that might have gone to a man. Later,
despite having graduated at the top of her Columbia Law School class in 1959,
Ginsburg was repeatedly passed over.
“Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate,” Ginsburg said in 2017,
remarking on her experience as a woman trying to break into a male-dominated
profession. “Probably, I would’ve climbed up the ladder and today I would be a
retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn
out to be great, good fortune.”
Appointed to the court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg chipped away
at discriminatory laws one case at a time, much as she had in the 1970s as the
co-founder and director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s influential
Women’s Rights Project. She nudged women ahead not through sweeping changes but
in specific cases of gender discrimination that sent powerful messages to state
legislatures on what’s allowed under the Constitution and what isn’t.
Powerful examples were her 1996 majority opinion opening the all-male Virginia
Military Institute to women, and stinging dissents in a Title VII employment
discrimination case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., in 2007, and in
the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case that extended to religious protections to
corporations.
In Ledbetter v. Goodyear, Ginsburg wrote in her dissent that the majority’s
ruling was both out of tune with the realities of wage discrimination, “a
cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad
remedial purpose,” and a “parsimonious reading of Title VII” that state
legislatures “may act to correct.”
Later, she worked closely with President Barack Obama to write the majority
opinion out of the law books with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the
first piece of legislation Obama signed.
In a passionate, 35-page dissent on the case involving Hobby Lobby’s refusal to
provide employees’ health care insurance with birth control coverage under the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Ginsburg called the 5-4 majority
ruling “a decision of startling breadth.”
Until that decision, she wrote, religious exemptions had never been extended to
any entity operating in “the commercial, profit-making world.”
“The reason why is hardly obscure,” she wrote. “Religious organizations exist
to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not
so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those
corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community. Indeed, by
law, no religion-based criterion can restrict the work force of for-profit
corporations … The distinction between a community made up of believers in the
same religion and one embracing persons of diverse beliefs, clear as it is,
constantly escapes the Court’s attention. One can only wonder why the Court
shuts this key difference from sight.”
Addressing the freedom-to-exercise-religion claims at the heart of the case,
Ginsburg wrote that “in sum, [y]our right to swing your arms ends just where
the other man’s nose begins.”
‘First Boy Who Cared That I Had A Brain’
Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, and grew up
in the Flatbush neighborhood. Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Odessa,
Ukraine, who worked as a furrier at the height of the Depression, and her
mother, born in New York to Austrian Jewish parents, worked in a garment
factory.
She credited her mother with instilling in her a lifelong love for education.
She graduated at the top of her class at Cornell University in 1954, the same
year she married Martin “Marty” Ginsburg, “the first boy I knew who cared that
I had a brain,” Ginsburg said in a 2014 interview with Katie Couric.
She took a break from her own education when the Ginsburgs’ first child was
born in 1955 and while her husband served in the military. When he returned,
she enrolled in Harvard Law and famously kept her position at the top of her
class while balancing the challenges of motherhood and monitoring her husband’s
classes after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1956.
She didn’t get a job until one of her Columbia professors explicitly refused to
recommend any other graduates for clerkships until U.S. District Judge Edmund
L. Palmieri hired her. She clerked for Palmieri for two years, and then got a
smattering of law firm offers, but turned them down because the salaries were
much lower than for the men were paid to do the same job.
A Staunch Defender Of Women
Instead, Ginsburg pursued her passions, most notably through the ACLU’s Women’s
Rights Project. She successfully argued six landmark cases before the Supreme
Court during that time, bringing about incremental change not only for women
who were discriminated against but also men.
A keen constitutional scholar, Ginsburg wove prior civil rights rulings on race
into her arguments and shrewdly used male plaintiffs in some cases to persuade
the Supreme Court to end gender discrimination. She often relied on the 14th
Amendment, including in Reed v. Reed in 1971, when the court used the
amendment’s Equal Protection Clause for the first time to strike down an Idaho
law that automatically favored the father over the mother as the administrator
of a minor child’s estate.
What she accomplished to improve gender equality during those years eclipsed
anything she’s done since, Ginsburg told National Public Radio in early 2019.
President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia in 1980, and she served for 13 years until her appointment
to the Supreme Court.
"I do think I was born under a very bright star," she told NPR in 2019. "I get
out of law schools with top grades; no law firm in the city of New York will
hire me; I end up with a teaching job and time to devote to evening out the
rights of women and men."
Ginsburg was preceded in death by her husband, Marty, in 2010. Just as she
watched over him and monitored his classes when they were in law school at
Harvard, he took care of her during her bouts with cancer and slept by her side
on a couch or cot when she was hospitalized. At one point, he noticed a problem
with her IV, and Ginsburg told NPR she “might not have lived if he hadn’t been
there.”
He served not only as her chef, putting his famed culinary skills to work on
meals, but also curated a morning reading list of newspaper clippings. “I miss
him every morning,” Ginsburg said in the early 2019 interview.
Ginsburg is survived by her two children, Jane C. Ginsburg, a professor at
Columbia Law School, and James Steven Ginsburg, the founder and president of
the Chicago-based Cedille Records, a classical recording company. Four
grandchildren also survive.
