On 18 September 2020, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at the age of 87, ending a legal career that had helped transform the status of women under American law.
Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court for 27 years, but much of the work that defined her legacy began decades before she became a justice. As a lawyer in the 1970s, she developed a deliberate legal strategy aimed at dismantling laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.
By the time of her death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had also become something unusual for a Supreme Court justice: a figure recognised far beyond legal and political circles, celebrated by supporters as the “Notorious RBG”.
From Brooklyn to the law
Born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, Ginsburg studied at Cornell University before attending Harvard Law School.
She entered Harvard as one of only nine women in her class, at a time when female students still faced formal and informal barriers within the institution. She later transferred to Columbia Law School, graduating first in her class. Despite her academic record, she struggled to secure employment in a legal profession where discrimination against women remained widespread.
Her own encounters with discrimination would become closely connected to the legal battles that defined the next stage of her career.
Taking gender discrimination to the Supreme Court
Ginsburg became one of the architects of the legal campaign against sex discrimination in the United States.
She was closely involved in the landmark 1971 case Reed v. Reed, in which the Supreme Court struck down an Idaho law that automatically preferred men over women when appointing administrators of estates.
It was the first time the Supreme Court had held that differential treatment based on sex violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.
In 1972, Ginsburg became a founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. Rather than attempting to overturn the legal system in a single case, she pursued a series of carefully selected challenges designed to establish precedents against gender discrimination.
Importantly, some of those cases involved discrimination against men. Ginsburg sought to demonstrate that rigid assumptions about the roles of men and women could harm both sexes.
During her work with the ACLU, she participated in dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and won five of the six cases she personally argued before it.
Becoming the second woman on the Supreme Court
After serving on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.
The Senate confirmed her by 96 votes to three, making her the second woman to serve on the country’s highest court after Sandra Day O’Connor.
One of her most significant majority opinions came in United States v. Virginia in 1996, when the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions policy.
As the ideological balance of the court changed, however, Ginsburg became increasingly known not for opinions written for the majority, but for her dissents.
The dissents that made her famous
In 2007, Ginsburg dissented in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., a pay discrimination case involving Lilly Ledbetter.
Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench and called on Congress to act. Congress subsequently passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009.
Another widely remembered dissent came after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated a central part of the Voting Rights Act.
Her increasingly prominent dissents helped turn an elderly Supreme Court justice into an unlikely pop-culture figure.
The nickname “Notorious RBG”, a play on rapper The Notorious B.I.G., spread online. Her image appeared on T-shirts, mugs and posters, while books, documentaries and a feature film brought her life and career to audiences far removed from constitutional law.
A death that reshaped the Supreme Court
Ginsburg died on 18 September 2020 following complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Her death came just 46 days before the US presidential election and immediately created a Supreme Court vacancy at an intensely politically charged moment.
President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace her, and the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Barrett shortly before the election.
Ginsburg’s death therefore marked more than the end of one of the most consequential legal careers of her generation. It also contributed to a significant change in the ideological composition of the Supreme Court.
A legacy written into American law
Ginsburg’s place in American history rests not simply on her 27 years as a Supreme Court justice, but on the legal campaign she helped wage before she ever joined the court.
When she began challenging sex discrimination, American law contained hundreds of provisions that explicitly treated men and women differently. Her strategy was to convince courts, case by case, that such distinctions could not be justified merely by traditional assumptions about the roles each sex should play.
Some of the causes and decisions associated with Ginsburg remain subjects of fierce political disagreement in the United States. Her transformation into a cultural icon also made her inseparable from the country’s increasingly polarised politics.
But the changes in gender equality law that Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped set in motion long before joining the Supreme Court remain embedded in the American legal landscape.
On 18 September 2020, her death closed a chapter that had begun when women were still a rarity in America’s leading law schools and discrimination on the basis of sex was openly written into the law.
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