Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice, Lawyer, Professor, and Architect of Legal Equality. 1933 - 2020

“Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933. There were several girls named Joan in her elementary school class, so her mother suggested that the teacher call her Ruth. The name stuck. The child her family knew as Kiki would grow into Ruth Bader Ginsburg—lawyer, professor, judge, and the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

The path between those two identities began at home. Her parents belonged to families of Jewish immigrants who came to America from Eastern Europe. Her father, Nathan Bader, worked as a furrier. Her mother, Celia, graduated from high school at fifteen but went to work in a garment factory rather than attend college, helping to finance her brother’s education. The possibilities available to a gifted girl of Celia’s generation were narrow, but she wanted something wider for her daughter.

Celia took Ruth to the public library and encouraged her to read. She taught her two lessons that Ginsburg would repeat throughout her life: be independent, and be a lady. Independence meant being able to support herself and direct her own life. Being a lady did not mean deference or delicacy. It meant refusing to be consumed by emotions that accomplished nothing. Anger, envy, and resentment, Celia believed, surrendered too much power to other people.

Loss entered Ruth’s life early. Her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis when Ruth was still a baby. Years later, Celia developed cancer while Ruth was in high school. Ruth completed her schoolwork beside her mother’s bed, trying to maintain the ordinary discipline of study as illness overtook the household. Celia died the day before Ruth’s graduation from James Madison High School.

Ruth could not attend the ceremony, where she was to receive awards for scholarship. She entered adulthood without the person who had most carefully prepared her for it. What remained were Celia’s expectations: learn, work, stand on your own, and don’t waste yourself in bitterness.

At Cornell University, Ruth studied government and encountered teachers who enlarged her sense of what words and institutions could do. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught her to pay close attention to language—the placement of a word, the rhythm of a sentence, the difference between what was nearly right and what was exact. Professor Robert Cushman introduced her to constitutional law and civil liberties during the McCarthy era, when fear of communism was being used to justify investigations and restrictions on speech. Ruth began to understand that law could threaten individual freedom, but could also protect it.

At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg. Marty was outgoing, humorous, and socially at ease; Ruth was reserved, serious, and exacting. What drew her to him was something less common than charm. He valued her intelligence. She later described him as the first young man she had known who cared that she had a brain.

They married in 1954, shortly after graduation. When Marty was called to military service, they moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Ruth found work at the local Social Security office, but after becoming pregnant with their daughter, Jane, she was demoted and her pay was reduced. It was an early lesson in the practical consequences of assumptions about women: pregnancy could make a capable employee appear less committed to her work.

Both Ginsburgs entered Harvard Law School in 1956. Ruth was one of nine women in a class of more than five hundred. The women were conspicuous and frequently treated as intruders. At a dinner, the law school dean asked them to explain why they were occupying places that might otherwise have gone to men.

Ruth responded to such encounters by becoming exceptionally well prepared. She joined the Harvard Law Review and rose near the top of her class while raising Jane. Then Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During his treatment, Ruth attended his classes as well as her own, collected notes from classmates, typed his papers, cared for their daughter, and continued her studies late into the night.

Marty recovered and accepted a position with a New York law firm. Ruth asked Harvard to allow her to complete her final year at Columbia while receiving a Harvard degree. When the request was denied, she transferred to Columbia Law School. She joined the Columbia Law Review and graduated in 1959 tied for first in her class.

Her record should have opened the most desirable doors in the profession. Instead, law firms and judges saw a woman, a mother, and a Jew. Each identity supplied another reason to doubt whether she belonged. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter declined to consider her for a clerkship. Federal District Judge Edmund Palmieri hired her only after one of her professors strongly recommended her and promised to provide a male replacement if she failed.

She did not fail. After two years with Palmieri, Ginsburg joined Columbia’s Project on International Procedure and studied the Swedish legal system. Sweden offered her a view of a society in which women’s participation in professional life was more widely accepted, though hardly free of difficulty. She learned Swedish and coauthored a book on civil procedure. The work strengthened her interest in how legal systems reflect the assumptions of the cultures that create them.

In 1963 she began teaching at Rutgers Law School. She was told she would be paid less than male colleagues because her husband earned a good salary. When she became pregnant with their second child, James, she concealed the pregnancy beneath loose clothing until her contract had been renewed. Later she joined other women on the faculty in challenging unequal pay.

By the early 1970s, the country was beginning to confront sex discrimination as a constitutional question. Ginsburg became Rutgers’s first female tenured professor and, in 1972, Columbia Law School’s first tenured woman professor. She taught one of the first courses devoted to sex discrimination law. At the same time, she helped establish the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project.

There was little constitutional precedent for the work she wanted to do. Laws openly distinguished between men and women, often presenting those distinctions as protection. Women were presumed to be dependent, maternal, and unsuited to certain forms of public responsibility. Men were presumed to be providers, workers, and heads of households. Ginsburg argued that both sexes were confined by these roles.

Her method was deliberate. She selected cases that exposed the irrationality of sex-based rules in circumstances judges could readily understand. Some of her clients were men harmed by laws built on stereotypes about women. Charles Moritz, an unmarried man caring for his elderly mother, was denied a tax deduction available to similarly situated women. Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife died in childbirth, could not receive the Social Security benefits a widow would have received while caring for a young child.

These cases demonstrated that discrimination was not simply a contest between women and men. It was a system of expectations that assigned people different rights and responsibilities according to sex. A rule that assumed every woman should be a caregiver also assumed that a man could not be one.

In Reed v. Reed, the Supreme Court invalidated an Idaho law that automatically preferred men over women as estate administrators. Ginsburg wrote the principal brief and credited civil-rights lawyer Pauli Murray and feminist attorney Dorothy Kenyon as coauthors, acknowledging the women whose thinking had prepared the ground on which she stood. The 1971 decision was the first time the Court struck down a law because it discriminated on the basis of sex.

Between 1973 and 1978, Ginsburg argued six gender-equality cases before the Supreme Court and won five. She didn’t overwhelm the justices with rhetoric. Small in stature and quiet in delivery, she built her arguments step by step, answering questions precisely and presenting equality as a constitutional principle rather than a social demand. She wanted decisions that would last, even if they came more slowly than activists outside the courtroom desired.

Her gradualism could frustrate those who wanted broader declarations. Ginsburg believed, however, that a court could lose public acceptance if it moved farther than the country was prepared to follow. Her aim was not merely to win a dramatic opinion, but to construct a body of precedent that later courts would find difficult to dismantle.

President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. During thirteen years on that court, she developed a reputation as a careful, moderate judge who sought agreement where possible. She worked easily with colleagues across ideological lines and rarely treated disagreement as evidence of bad faith.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court. At her confirmation hearing, she spoke openly about the constitutional equality of women while declining to forecast how she would rule in future cases. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 96–3.

On the Court, Ginsburg’s most important majority opinion came in United States v. Virginia in 1996. The Virginia Military Institute had excluded women throughout its history, arguing that its rigorous educational method was unsuitable for them. Writing for the Court, Ginsburg held that the state could not deny women an opportunity on the basis of generalizations about their abilities. Any government defending a sex-based classification, she wrote, must offer an “exceedingly persuasive justification.”

As the Court grew more conservative, Ginsburg increasingly found herself in dissent. Her dissents were sharply reasoned but seldom personal. She circulated drafts among her colleagues, considered their objections, and revised when they revealed a weakness. Even when she believed the majority profoundly mistaken, she addressed its reasoning rather than its motives.

Her friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia became the most visible example of this separation between disagreement and contempt. Their interpretations of the Constitution often stood far apart, yet they shared a love of opera, travel, language, and argument. Each recognized the other as a serious mind. Scalia could make Ginsburg laugh; Ginsburg could make Scalia reconsider a careless phrase. Their friendship didn’t soften their convictions. It allowed conviction and affection to occupy the same room.

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, the Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, who had discovered late in her career that she had been paid less than male colleagues. Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, explaining how pay discrimination often accumulates gradually and remains concealed. She concluded by inviting Congress to correct the Court’s interpretation. Congress responded with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

The dissent demonstrated what Ginsburg believed a minority opinion could accomplish. It could identify the error in a present decision, educate the public, guide lawmakers, and preserve an argument for the future. A dissent spoke to a later age when the Court might see what it had failed to see before.

Her private life remained anchored by Marty. His humor balanced her seriousness; his confidence in her never appeared threatened by her success. A gifted tax lawyer and enthusiastic cook, he assumed much of the domestic work at a time when such arrangements were unusual. When President Clinton considered her for the Supreme Court, Marty quietly built support for her nomination.

Ginsburg survived repeated bouts of cancer while continuing to hear cases, write opinions, exercise with a personal trainer, and attend the opera whenever she could. In 2010, after fifty-six years of marriage, Marty died of cancer. The following morning, the final decision day of the Court’s term, she took her seat and announced an opinion. Her voice was subdued but steady. She knew, she said, that Marty would have wanted her to be there.

Late in life, Ginsburg became an unlikely cultural celebrity. Law students transformed the rapper’s name Notorious B.I.G. into “Notorious RBG,” placing her image on shirts, posters, mugs, and tattoos. She enjoyed the joke, though the icon sometimes obscured the lawyer beneath it: the scholar of civil procedure, the meticulous editor, the patient strategist who had spent decades changing constitutional law one carefully chosen case at a time.

She remained on the Court through further illness, convinced that she could continue to perform the work. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at the age of eighty-seven. She became the first woman and the first Jewish American to lie in state at the United States Capitol.

The distance between Joan Ruth Bader of Brooklyn and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was crossed without a sudden transformation. The qualities were visible early: attention, endurance, independence, loyalty, and an unusual command of language. Experience gave those qualities direction. Exclusion taught her where the law failed. Partnership showed her what equality could look like in daily life. Teaching clarified her thought, advocacy tested it, and judging required her to apply it beyond the causes with which she was most closely identified.

Through it all, dignity became one of her greatest strengths—not as formality or reserve, but as command of herself. She would not allow exclusion to make her bitter, provocation to make her careless, or disagreement to become contempt. She understood both the authority and the limits of law. Anger could recognize an injustice, but it could not, by itself, write a durable rule. That work demanded preparation, patience, exact language, and the ability to address opponents as people who might yet be persuaded.

That was how Joan Ruth Bader became Justice Ginsburg: not by becoming louder than the people and institutions that doubted her, but by mastering their language—and herself—so thoroughly that they could no longer ignore what she had to say.

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Written September 7, 2026