Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at age 87. She served 27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court after President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993. She was best known as an advocate who spent her life working for equal treatment of women and men under the law.

Early life

Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933. Her love of learning started young, and her mother pushed both her and her brother to excel in school. She graduated from James Madison High School and went on to Cornell University.

At Cornell, she met Martin Ginsburg. They married in 1954, the year she graduated. Martin was then drafted and served two years in the Army, and their first child, Jane, was born in 1955, during his service.

Law school and early career

After Martin's service ended, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, one of only a handful of women in her class. She faced many challenges there: open sexism from classmates and teachers, hardships at home, and the work of keeping top grades while caring for a young child. When Martin took a job in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School.

She graduated from Columbia tied for first in her class. Even so, she struggled to find a job. It took strong pressure, including a threat, from Columbia professor Gerald Gunther to get Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of New York to hire her as a law clerk, and she worked for him for two years.

Teaching and the ACLU

After her clerkship, she changed career paths. From 1961 to 1963, she worked as a research associate, and later associate director, of Columbia Law School's Project on International Procedure. She focused on civil procedure in Sweden and studied abroad at Lund University. She later taught at Rutgers Law School. In 1972, she joined the Columbia faculty and became the first woman there to earn tenure.

At the same time, she co-founded and led the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. She argued that unequal treatment hurt both women and men. She argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five.

Judge and Justice

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She served there until President Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993.

Her work on the Court touched federal sentencing too. In United States v. Booker (2005), she joined both five-justice majorities, the one holding mandatory guidelines unconstitutional and the one making the guidelines advisory.

Justice Ginsburg was survived by her son, James, and her daughter, Jane. Her memory will be treasured by all who knew her. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to her husband, Martin, who died in 2010.

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