Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a statement, “Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature.” Ginsburg, who had survived several bouts with cancer, began receiving chemotherapy treatment for lesions on her liver in July. Appointed by former President Bill Clinton, the 5-foot-1 Ginsburg became a giant on the U.S. Supreme Court since being confirmed by the Senate on August 3, 1993. She was only the second woman to serve on the highest court after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was appointed in 1981. Praising Ginsburg at a public speaking engagement in 2019, Clinton said, “I liked her, and I believed in her. I just knew she was the right person for the court. But I have to say in the last 26 years, she has far exceeded even my expectations.” Ginsburg was one of four liberal justices in a judiciary body that had shifted to a conservative majority with President Trump’s appointment of two conservative judges, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In recent years, Ginsburg had become a pop-culture icon nicknamed “Notorious RBG,” admired for her strength, dedication, and long career fighting for justice and equality for all. “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time,” Ginsburg once said.
A Vital Voice in Landmark Decisions
Among her most significant rulings was her authoring of the court’s opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s (VMI) male-only admissions policy for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decisions determined that qualified women could not be denied admission to VMI. She was one of the decisive votes in a 5-4 decision in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which ruled that the Constitution guaranteed a right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states. She played a crucial role in striking down legislation that allowed certain noncitizens to be expelled under the Trump administration in Sessions v. Dimaya (2018). She fought for people with mental disabilities in Olmsted v. L.C. (1999), which reinforced the right of people with developmental disabilities to live in the community rather than be unduly placed in a mental institution or facility. Some of her dissents were as notable as her concurring opinions. When George W. Bush’s campaign filed an emergency application to the Court to stop the manual recount of the ballots in the 2000 presidential election against then-Vice President Al Gore, Ginsburg was one of two justices who disagreed with a ruling favoring Bush in Bush v. Gore (2000). Critics say that by stopping the recount, the Court handed the presidency to Bush without every vote being fairly counted. Those familiar with court protocol called Ginsburg’s dissent as particularly notable for she responded “I dissent” rather than the traditional “I respectfully dissent.” Another famous dissent came with Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (2007), which addressed pay disparities between men and women. The majority ruled in favor of Goodyear, saying that Lilly Ledbetter could have sued when the pay decisions were made, instead of waiting beyond a 180-day statutory charging period. Ginsburg argued that the decision was unfair because Ledbetter would have had to have sued before she knew she had been a victim of discrimination. Ginsburg pressed Congress to amend the law, which it eventually did with the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which overturned the Supreme Court ruling that severely restricted the time period for filing complaints regarding employment discrimination concerning compensation.
A Pioneer and Champion for Women’s Equality
Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, to Jewish immigrant parents, Ginsburg grew up in Midwood, a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Her father worked as a furrier and her mother was a garment factory worker. She attended James Madison High School, where Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Chuck Schumer, and reality TV’s Judge Judy also graduated. The cello-playing Brooklyn Dodgers fan was heavily influenced by her mother, who instilled a love of education in her. Her mother died of cancer before Ginsburg graduated from high school. On a scholarship, Ginsburg went to Cornell University, where she graduated first in her class in 1954. At Cornell, she met her husband Martin on a blind date. Ruth would later say, “He was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain." They married shortly after her graduation. In 1954, Martin completed his first year at Harvard Law School, but was drafted into the U.S. Army for two years. Both Ruth and Martin put their careers on hold as he completed his military service and they started a family. Their first child, Jane, was born in 1955. In the fall of 1956, Martin resumed his studies at Harvard Law School and Ginsburg enrolled. She became one of only nine women in a class of about 500 men. Along with the challenges of earning a degree in a male-dominated environment, Ginsburg struggled with the responsibilities of tending to her infant daughter as well as her husband, who was being treated with radiation for testicular cancer. Because Martin couldn’t always attend class, Ruth would get notes from him and help keep him up to date with his studies. Ginsburg became the first female member of the Harvard Law Review, the prestigious legal journal. When Martin graduated a year ahead of Ruth and received a job offer at a law firm in New York City, Ruth left Harvard with just one year to graduate. She transferred to Columbia University Law School where she shined as well, serving on the law review there and graduating top of her class in 1959. Looking for work as a female lawyer in the early 1960s wasn’t always easy, and Ginsburg often faced sexual discrimination when applying for positions. After clerking for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri, she accepted a job as a professor at Rutgers University Law School in 1963. She kept that position until 1972, when she began to teach at Columbia University, where she became the first female professor to earn tenure. Prior to serving on the Supreme Court, one of the highlights of her career was founding the Women’s Rights Project (WRP) at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1972. The organization has been dedicated to fighting in the courts for sex discrimination to be treated in the same constitutional terms as race discrimination. The WRP confronts various forms of sex discrimination permitted by law and pursues strategies to overcome practices which, even if they were not explicitly allowed by the law, effectively deny true equality to women. As director of the WRP, Ginsburg argued six landmark cases concerning gender equality before the Supreme Court. One of her first case before the high court was Frontiero v. Richards (1973), which decided that benefits given by the United States military to the family of service members cannot be given out differently because of sex. According to the ACLU, Brenda Feigen, codirector of the WRP, described her presentation before the court as mesmerizing. “I’ve never heard an oral argument as unbelievably cogent as hers,” Feigen said. “Not a single Justice asked a single question.” Ginsburg spoke from memory, citing cases and speaking about women’s history without ever turning to her notes or checking any citations. Ginsburg believed that law should be gender blind. She proved that stance when she successfully argued against a provision in the Social Security Act that denied to widowed fathers benefits afforded to widowed mothers in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975). In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She served there until 1993 when the Senate in a vote of 96 to 3 confirmed her to the U.S. Supreme Court. The 2018 movie On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones, was a docudrama based on Ginsburg’s young adult life leading up to her time on the Supreme Court.
A Later Life Plagued With Health Issues
In 1999, Justice Ginsburg, at age 66, underwent colon cancer surgery. After having a sigmoid colectomy, Ginsburg received nine months of “precautionary” chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Although physically weakened, she did not miss a day on the bench. To recover and regain health, she worked with a personal trainer. The “RBG Workout,” which includes medicine ball pushups, pistol squats, and two different types of planks, became a sensation in its own right. About a decade later in 2009, a routine exam revealed that she had early stage pancreatic cancer. After she had surgery to remove the body and tail of her pancreas, along with her spleen, she again received chemo and radiation therapy, according to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, with more than 56,000 diagnoses estimated in 2019, according to PanCAN. The disease has the lowest survival rate of all major cancers at just 9 percent, PanCAN notes. But Ginsburg returned to work 18 days after surgery. After experiencing discomfort during routine exercise in 2014, doctors discovered she had a blockage and placed a stent in her right coronary artery, a procedure known as a coronary catheterization. In November of 2018, Ginsburg fell in her Supreme Court office, fracturing three ribs. Although she returned to work the next day, CT scans revealed that she had two cancerous nodules in her lungs. The 85-year-old successfully had a lobectomy, and was again deemed cancer-free. As NPR reported December 21, 2018, on a Friday afternoon, from her hospital bed, shortly after her surgery, she cast a decisive vote, refusing to allow the Trump administration to implement its new rules prohibiting people from seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. For the first time since joining the Court more than 25 years earlier, Ginsburg missed oral argument on January 7, 2019, while she recuperated. Ginsburg, however, couldn’t escape the cancer for long. In August of 2019, doctors again spotted a tumor on her pancreas. Ginsburg received three weeks of focused radiation treatment to ablate the lesion. The Supreme Court issued a statement, “The tumor was treated definitively, and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body.” Ginsburg told CNN on January 7, 2020, that she continued to be cancer-free. Lesions were detected on her liver in February, but they were greatly reduced by chemotherapy. In the beginning of May, she was hospitalized and was treated for acute cholecystitis, a benign gallbladder condition. She participated in a Supreme Court teleconference hearing and discharged the same day. On July 14, she returned to the hospital to treat a possible infection and clean out a bile duct stent, as CNN reported. Three days later, however, the 87-year-old announced that she was still receiving chemotherapy sessions about every two weeks, but that it was not interfering with her work. “I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam. I remain fully able to do that,” Ginsburg said at the time, according to the Associated Press.
