Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was more than a United States Supreme Court (USSC) justice. She was more than a Cornell and Harvard graduate. She was arguably an icon in a way that no justice has been in the history of the USSC. She died on Sep. 18, at the age of 87, after complications with pancreatic cancer arose.
Following her death, Americans flooded the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. to remember her life and mourn. Candles, pictures of the justice and tears were in abundance, something that is rarely seen in the wake of a justice’s death.
Ginsburg was not always the feminist icon that she came to be. While she was attending law school at Harvard, the dean hosted a dinner with the other women in the program about why they deserved to have a spot when there were men who could fill it. In response, she simply stated that she wanted to be able to help and understand her husband, who was also enrolled in the program, in his line of work.
She would not become the RBG that we came to know until moving to Sweden for work. At the time, Sweden was a much more progressive nation than the United States. It was here that she found the ideology that men and women have one job, which is to be the best people they can be. This concept planted seeds in her mind that would eventually grow when she returned to the U.S.
When she returned home, she began teaching and taking cases that were brought to her by women. She would win some and lose some. However, the former occurred much more often. Eventually, she began a women’s rights movement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
As those seeds from Sweden began to bloom, Ginsburg took an incredibly unique approach to her movement. Instead of taking cases for women who were being unfairly treated due to their gender, she began taking cases for men who were being unfairly treated. By doing so, her cases would make judges and justices a part of her social revolution, even if they did not realize it. By the end of her tenure with the ACLU, she had led the Supreme Court into a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
When President Jimmy Carter took office, the administration put a concerted effort into appointing women to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1980, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a judge for the District of Columbia Circuit. She would serve for 13 years and moved away from being an activist and became a much more moderate judge. She believed that it was her responsibility, as a judge, to treat all parties equally in the eyes of the law. She was oftentimes the bridge between the party lines on the bench and would side with both throughout her service.
In 1993, Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the USSC. She was confirmed by a near unanimous vote, becoming the second woman to sit on the bench. This was still not the RBG that became a household name, though. She was the newest justice and did not get many high profile cases. This changed when she presented the court’s opinion for United States v. Virginia. The case concerned the Virginia Military Institute not allowing women to enroll, although it was a public institution. The court ruled against the state, citing that not allowing women to attend the school violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Following this case, she had many decisions regarding abortion and equal protections, yet she still was not the icon that would receive such a substantial public mourning after her death. After Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the court, Ginsburg would become the only woman on the bench. This was when she became the voice of dissent of the court. In the case Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which regarded the statute of limitations on a female worker being paid less than men in the same position as herself, the court ruled in favor of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. This was when RBG became the icon that we know today.
“Four members of this court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and I, dissent from today’s decision,” Justice Ginsburg read from the bench. “In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims to pay discrimination. Ledbetter’s initial readiness to give her employer the benefit of the doubt should not preclude her from later seeking redress for the continuing payment to her of a salary depressed because of her sex. Today, the ball again lies in Congress’s court. As in 1991the legislature has cause to note and correct this court’s parsimonious reading of Title VII.”
In reading that dissent from the bench, something that justices had rarely done at that point in time, she showed the media that this small case had gone incredibly wrong. From this moment on, there was a change in her attitude on the court.
Linda Greenhouse, a journalist for the New York Times who covers the Supreme Court, wrote an article about this moment.
“I wrote a story, not only describing the Ledbetter case, but I wrote a story that said, ‘This is the term that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice,” she said in an interview on The Daily. “And it was a voice in dissent.”
Following the court’s decision, Congress passed an amended version of the Equal Pay Act. This new law was called the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Act. In essence, the ball had been placed in Congress’s court by Ginsburg and they did not fumble it.
“It was not the most important case. It was not her most important dissent,” Greenhouse said. “But I think it was a moment that not only meant a lot to her, but signaled a transformation in the Justice Ginsburg that had been before and the rockstar Justice Ginsburg that, in her last years on the court, she became.”
From that moment, she became the iconic justice that Americans came to know. She became the Notorious RBG, a nickname stemming from the book about her life by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik.
Rosh Hashanah began at sundown on the day of Ginsburg’s death — she was Jewish. Ruth Franklin, a book critic and finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, took to twitter after the news broke to offer a deeper meaning to the icon’s death.
“According to Jewish tradition, a person who dies on Rosh Hashanah, which began tonight, is a tzaddik, a person of great righteousness,” she said.
