Ruth Bader Ginsburg

From Grokipedia

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death. Born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents, she earned her bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954 and attended Harvard Law School before transferring to Columbia Law School, where she graduated tied for first in her class in 1959. Following law school, Ginsburg faced employment discrimination due to her gender and motherhood but secured a clerkship with federal judge Edmund L. Palmieri and later worked in private practice before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School in 1963 and Columbia Law School in 1972, where she became the first woman to hold a tenured professorship. In 1972, she co-founded and directed the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, leading litigation that challenged legal distinctions based on sex and arguing six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five. Appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, Ginsburg authored opinions emphasizing statutory interpretation and equal protection principles during her 13-year tenure. Nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was confirmed by the Senate in a 96-3 vote, becoming the second female justice after Sandra Day O'Connor. On the Court, she wrote majority opinions in landmark cases such as United States v. Virginia (1996), which invalidated the Virginia Military Institute's male-only admissions policy under the Equal Protection Clause, while her dissents in decisions like Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007) highlighted limitations in statutory remedies for employment discrimination and influenced subsequent federal legislation. Her approach prioritized incremental judicial change and formal equality, though critics contended it sometimes deferred broader substantive reforms; her death from pancreatic cancer complications at age 87, shortly before the 2020 presidential election, enabled President Donald Trump to appoint Amy Coney Barrett, altering the Court's 6-3 conservative majority.

In brief

Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn, a Jewish girl who lost her mother the day before high-school graduation and then built a career on equal protection. At Harvard and Columbia Law she was the woman in the room. She made the room change.

Before the Court she argued sex-discrimination cases that rewrote statutes by treating women and men as persons under the same clause. On the Court she became a precise, durable voice, famous late for dissents that read like future majorities.

She kept a working friendship across ideology and a set of collars that the culture turned into costume. The opinions are the point.

The accomplishment is a docket. A Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn taught the Constitution to notice half the country it had been trained to treat as a special case.