Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, the second daughter of Jewish immigrants Nathan and Celia Bader. After a childhood marked by the loss of her older sister and the early death of her mother, she excelled academically, graduating top of her class at Cornell University in 1954 and marrying future tax attorney Martin D. Ginsburg a month later. She pursued a legal education at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in a class of five hundred, and then transferred to Columbia Law School, graduating joint‑first in 1959 and becoming the first woman to serve on both the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review. Ginsburg’s early career was shaped by persistent gender bias, yet she broke barriers as a clerk for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri (1960‑1962) and as a research associate at Columbia, where she co‑authored a book on Swedish civil procedure that deepened her commitment to gender equality. From 1963 to 1972 she taught at Rutgers Law School, becoming the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School in 1972, and co‑founded the pioneering Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, arguing and winning six landmark Supreme Court cases that dismantled sex‑based discrimination. Appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980, she earned a reputation as a moderate consensus‑builder before President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993, making her the first Jewish woman and the second female justice. On the high court she authored influential majority opinions in United States v. Virginia (1996) and Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), while her powerful dissents—most famously in Ledbetter v. Goodyear—earned her the nickname “Notorious R.B.G.”. Despite battling colon, pancreatic, and other cancers, she remained on the bench until her death on September 18, 2020, leaving a lasting legacy of legal scholarship, steadfast advocacy for gender equality, and cultural impact that transcended the judiciary.