Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death on September 18, 2020. She was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor. Her dissenting opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was credited with inspiring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009.

About Ruth Bader Ginsburg in brief

Summary Ruth Bader GinsburgJoan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death on September 18, 2020. She was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg wrote notable majority opinions, including United States v. Virginia, Olmstead v. L. C. and Friends of the Earth, Inc. Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D. C., at the age of 87, from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Given the proximity of her death to the 2020 election and Ginsburg’s wish for her replacement not to be chosen until a new president is installed, the decision for President Trump to appoint Amy Coney Barrett as her replacement proved controversial after the Senate Republican majority’s prior refusal to hold a hearing or vote for Merrick Garland in early 2016 under Barack Obama after the death of Antonin Scalia. Her dissenting opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was credited with inspiring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. Her father was a Jewish emigrant from Odessa, Ukraine, and her mother was born in New York to parents who came from Kraków, Poland, at that time part of Austria-Hungary. Her older sister died when she was a baby. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and married Martin D. Ginsburg, becoming a mother before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class.

During the early 1960s she worked with the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, learned Swedish and co-authored a book with Swedish jurist Anders Bruzelius; her work in Sweden profoundly influenced her thinking on gender equality. She advocated as a volunteer attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and was a member of its board of directors and one of its general counsel in the 1970s. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She served until her appointment to the Supreme court in 1993. She eventually became part of the liberal wing of the Court as the Court shifted to the right over time. She later embraced the moniker ‘The Notorious R. B. G. \”, and she later embraced it. Her family called her ‘Kiki’, a nickname given to her as a baby by her older sister, Marylin, who was nicknamed ‘Rutha kicky’ by other girls in the class. Although not devout, the Bader family belonged to the Orthodox Jewish community and Ruth attended a summer program at Camp Che-Na-Walfour, a summer camp for girls aged 14–15 years old. Ruth was not allowed to have a bat mitzvah because of restrictions on women reading the Torah, which upset her. She died of complications from metastatic cancer, aged 87.