After 27 years on the Supreme Court, the justice’s initials, RBG, were synonymous with her. Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Sept. 18 after a series of high-profile health challenges. Ginsburg was 87 years old when she died.
Ginsburg was hailed as a champion of women’s and LGBTQ rights because she was the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court. Many young women looked up to liberal justice as role models and feminist icons. She had a devoted following among them. A look back at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and work.
Early Life
As Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second daughter of Celia and Nathan was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. Marilyn, Ginsburg’s six-year-old sister, died of meningitis when she was a baby. Ginsburg graduated from James Madison High School at the age of 15 and went on to attend Princeton University. Her mother died of cancer just one day before her graduation.
In 1954, Ginsburg graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in government. Following that, she was one of only a handful of females in her graduating class of roughly 500 at Harvard Law School. At Columbia Law School, Ginsburg had to leave because of a disagreement with the school’s misogynistic dean. She graduated in 1959.
Career Beginnings
Ginsburg had a difficult time finding a job because of the sexism in the legal field at the time. Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court turned her down for a clerkship in 1960 because of her gender. In the end, Ginsburg was hired as a legal clerk for US District Court Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the Southern District of New York after a frightening endorsement from her Columbia professor Gerald Gunther.
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Academia
The Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure hired Ginsburg as a research associate in 1961, and she was later promoted to assistant director. She traveled to Sweden to conduct research for the project, and she and co-author Anders Bruzelius wrote a book together. As she developed her ideas on gender equality, Ginsburg drew on her experiences living in Sweden, which at the time had substantially higher levels of gender equality than the United States.
Ginsburg’s first faculty position was at Rutgers Law School in 1963. Until her retirement in 1972, she was one of only a handful of female law professors in the United States. The Women’s Rights Law Reporter was co-founded by Ginsburg while she was a student at Rutgers. She went on to teach at Columbia Law School, her alma mater, for the rest of her career.
Legal Career in the 70s
In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU. From 1973 to 1974, she served as a general attorney in more than 300 cases of gender discrimination for the Project. The Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution was one of Ginsburg’s many victories, thanks in part to her tireless activism and litigation work with the American Civil Liberties Union. For the remainder of her career, she worked on the Women’s Rights Project.
US Court of Appeals
Nominations for Ginsburg’s position as an appeals court judge were first made by President Carter in April 1980, and she was sworn in on September 4, 1980. A few months later, she was officially identified. With Antonin Scalia and Robert H. Bork, she frequently found common ground with conservative colleagues throughout her time on the Supreme Court.
US Supreme Court
President Clinton nominated Ginsburg to succeed Byron White on the Supreme Court in 1993, and she resigned from the US Court of Appeals to accept the post. When she was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court, she became only the second woman and the first Jew to do so. Throughout her time on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg wrote numerous majority opinions. These include United States v. Virginia, Olmstead v. L.C., and the City of Sherrill vs Oneida Indian Nation of New York, which were all decided by the Supreme Court between 1996 and 2005.
Personal Life and Death
Ruth Ginsburg met her future husband Martin D. Ginsburg while they were both students at Cornell. Marten was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he married Ruth a month after she graduated from high school. As a tax attorney, Martin worked at Weil, Gotshal & Manges and lectured at Georgetown University Law Center for a while. A daughter named Jane was born in 1955, and a son named James was born in 1965 to the Ginsburgs. At Columbia Law School, Jane lectures, while James is the creator and CEO of Cedille Records. Martin Ginsburg died of cancer in 2010.
In her own time, Ginsburg had to deal with her health issues. Despite being diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, she never missed a single day of her tenure on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg worked out with Bryant Johnson, a former Army reservist, in a gym reserved for justices only to improve her physical condition. Ginsburg was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, over a decade after surviving colon cancer.
She was able to return to the bench after completing effective treatment. After a fall in her office in 2018, Ginsburg broke three ribs. She was diagnosed with lung cancer while she was in the hospital. In early 2019, Ginsburg had a lobectomy and returned to the bench. After undergoing therapy for a recurrence of pancreatic cancer later that year, she is expected to require more treatment in 2020 in the event of another occurrence. At the age of 87, Ginsburg succumbed to the consequences of pancreatic cancer in September of 2020.
Legacy
She is well known for her untiring efforts to promote women’s rights and gender equality. The National Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 2002. In recognition of her contributions, she was honored with numerous honors, including the Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, the Liberty Medal, and World Peace and Liberty Award.
With her well-known face and trademark jabot appearing on everything from graffiti to tattoos to T-shirts, Ginsburg has become something of a cultural icon in the United States. On “Saturday Night Live,” Kate McKinnon portrayed Ginsburg in a memorable role. Both the Oscar-nominated documentary “RBG” and the biographical drama film “Based on Sex,” which featured Felicity Jones as Ginsburg, were based on the life of justice.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Net Worth
A lawyer and judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a net worth of $8 million upon her death, according to the most recent asset declaration information. Her financial report said that she had assets ranging from $4 million to $18 million. Long before she retired from the bench, she was the Supreme Court’s highest-paid justice. According to her 2002 financial report, Ruth had a net worth ranging from $8 million to $34 million. Her residence in Washington, D.C., was not included in her estimated fortune.
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