Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies: Champion of Gender Equality

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was rejected by every law firm she applied to after graduating first in her class from Columbia Law School in 1959. She was a woman, she was Jewish, and she was a mother: three strikes. She ended up teaching law instead. Her strategy for dismantling gender discrimination in the courts was deliberate: she selected cases involving men discriminated against by gender-based laws, calculating that male judges would find those easier to sympathize with. It worked. By the time she joined the Supreme Court in 1993, the legal architecture of sex discrimination had been fundamentally altered by her earlier work. She died in September 2020, six weeks before a presidential election. Born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn in 1933, she was the daughter of a furrier and a garment factory worker. Her mother, who never attended college, instilled in her the value of education and independence. Ginsburg attended Cornell, where she met Martin Ginsburg, and then Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of 500. She transferred to Columbia when Martin took a job in New York. Despite her academic achievements, no New York law firm would hire her, and even Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to hire her as a clerk because she was a woman. She taught at Rutgers and Columbia law schools before co-founding the ACLU's Women's Rights Project in 1972, where she argued six landmark gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five. Her deliberate strategy of choosing male plaintiffs to demonstrate that gender-based legal distinctions harmed everyone was tactically brilliant: it forced the Court to establish precedents that applied regardless of which gender was affected. President Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993, where she served for 27 years and became a cultural icon, known as "Notorious RBG."