Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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.

Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to Nathan Bader and Celia Amster Bader, both of Jewish heritage. Her father, Nathan, immigrated from Odesa, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), at age thirteen and worked as a furrier during the Great Depression, achieving modest success in fur manufacturing despite lacking formal high school education. Her mother, Celia, was born in New York to Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary and initially worked in a garment factory before focusing on homemaking and supporting the family business.