Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, feminist pioneer and progressive icon, dies at 87. From @AHoweBlogger
scotusblog.com
scotusblog.com
Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, she was quickly nicknamed “Kiki” by her older sister Marilyn, who died in 1934 of meningitis at the age of 6. Neither of her parents attended college: Her father, Nathan, came to the US from Russia as a teenager and worked as a furrier.
Her mother, Celia Amster Bader, was born a few months after her parents arrived in the country from Austria and worked in a garment factory. Her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer around the time Ginsburg began 9th grade and died 2 days before her high school graduation.
After arriving at Cornell, she met Martin (Marty) Ginsburg on a blind date. Marty Ginsburg was, Ginsburg said, “the first boy I knew who cared that I had a brain.”
During law school, Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer, requiring two surgeries & radiation therapy. Ruth Ginsburg cared not only for their daughter Jane then a toddler, but also for Marty, and typed his papers for him while keeping up with her own coursework.
Although Ruth Ginsburg had completed two years at Harvard, her degree would come from Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her class. She was the first person to be a member of both the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review.
Despite her top grades at Columbia, no law firm in NY would hire Ginsburg after graduation. Many years later she observed that she had “struck out on 3 grounds. I was Jewish, a woman, & a mother. The 1st raised one eyebrow; the 2nd, two; the 3rd made me indubitably inadmissible.”
Ginsburg’s second child, James, was born in 1965. Because she did not yet have tenure at Rutgers & feared that she might not be rehired if the school knew she was expecting, she hid her pregnancy by borrowing her mother-in-law’s larger clothes until her contract was renewed.
Ginsburg argued 6 cases before SCOTUS, winning 5. Her 1st argument came in 1973, in the case of Sharron Frontiero, an Air Force lieutenant who challenged a federal benefits law that treated married female members of the armed forces less favorably than their male counterparts.
A major part of the strategy employed by Ginsburg and the ACLU was using men as plaintiffs to challenge gender-based classifications. She said, “the men were complaining about discrimination rooted in a certain way of thinking about women — as dependents, much like children,
subservient to the male head of the household,” but these cases also “helped judges — who, in those days, were almost uniformly male — to understand that” these distinctions also harmed men and children.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. During her time on the D.C. Circuit, she began what many regarded as an unlikely friendship with Antonin Scalia, then a judge on the D.C. Circuit.
In a 2007 interview, Scalia said that he and Ginsburg were “two people who are quite different in their core beliefs, but who respect each other’s character and ability. There is nobody else I spend every New Year’s Eve with.”
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