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What It Takes is an audio podcast produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: public service, science and exploration, sports, technology, business, arts and humanities, and justice.

Even if you meet Prince Charming, be able to fend for yourself.

Ruth Joan Bader was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother Celia was born in the United States to immigrant parents newly arrived from Austria; her father Nathan immigrated to the United States from Russia at age 13. The Baders' first daughter died when Ruth was only two.

Although Nathan Bader never attended high school, he achieved some success as a fur manufacturer, while Celia worked in the home and helped with the family business. While Mrs. Bader never pursued a career of her own, she encouraged Ruth's scholarly and professional ambitions, taking her to the library every week to keep her supplied with books. Celia Bader suffered from poor health throughout Ruth's teen years, dying of cancer the day before Ruth graduated from James Madison High School.

At Cornell University, Ruth Bader earned a bachelor's degree with high honors in government and distinction in all subjects. It was also at Cornell that she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, on a blind date. They were married shortly after Ruth Bader's graduation, and lived in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Ginsburg completed his military service. Following his discharge, he started legal studies at Harvard, and 14 months after the birth of their daughter, Jane, Ruth too entered Harvard Law School.

One of only nine women in a class of more than 500, Ruth encountered resistance from some of the older faculty. The law dean asked all the women students to justify taking places at the school that could be occupied by men. While attending Harvard, Martin Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During his illness, Ruth attended his classes, as well as her own, and typed all his papers. Even with the added responsibility of caring for her ailing husband and their child, she won a coveted seat on the Harvard Law Review. Martin Ginsburg made a complete recovery, and after completing his studies at Harvard, joined a law firm in New York City. In the next few years, he became a highly regarded expert on tax law.

To keep her young family together, Ruth Ginsburg transferred to Columbia University in Manhattan for her last year of law school. At Columbia too, she won a seat on the law review. Serving on both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews was an unprecedented achievement for any law student, male or female. Ginsburg graduated from Columbia tied for first place in her class.

Despite this stellar academic record, she found her sex a barrier to career advancement. A firm that had employed her between terms at Harvard failed to provide a permanent position. Of the 12 firms with which she interviewed, not one offered her a job. Although Professor Albert Sachs of Harvard personally recommended her to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Justice declined to offer her the post of law clerk, apparently too uncomfortable with the thought of a woman in his chambers.

Ginsburg was eventually offered a clerkship with Judge Edmund G. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where she served from 1959 to 1961. Following this experience, she finally received several offers from major law firms, but instead returned to Columbia, to work on the law school's Project on International Procedure. She became associate director of the project, taught herself Swedish and traveled to the University of Lund to study the Swedish legal system. In 1963, she became a professor of law at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. While there, she completed a textbook, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), published the same year her son, James, was born. In 1970, Ginsburg co-founded The Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the United States devoted to gender equality issues. Two years later, she moved from Rutgers to Columbia University Law School, and became the first woman to receive tenure there. In 1973, she argued her first case before the United States Supreme Court. After the American Civil Liberties Union referred a number of sex discrimination complaints to her, she founded the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. She became the project's general counsel, as well as serving on the national board of the ACLU. At the time, she was writing the first textbook on sex discrimination law, Text, Cases, and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination, published in 1974.

In these years, she also began to speak as a visiting lecturer at law schools and other institutions in the United States and Europe, including the law schools of Harvard and New York University, the Universities of Amsterdam and Strasbourg, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Ginsburg continued to appear frequently before the Supreme Court, arguing cases of sex discrimination. One of the most important of these was Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975). Stephen Wiesenfeld was a widower who had been denied the Social Security child support benefits that a woman would have received in the same situation. Her victory in this case was followed three years later by another in Duren v. Missouri. State law in Missouri had made jury duty compulsory for men but optional for women. Ginsburg argued that this devalued women's contribution as citizens, and once again Ginsburg's position prevailed. By this time, she had earned a national reputation as a leading advocate for the equal citizenship status of men and women.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Martin Ginsburg followed her to Washington, where he continued to practice tax law as well as becoming a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Their daughter, Jane Ginsburg, followed her parents into the legal profession, and became a law professor at Columbia. Their son, James, shared his mother's love of classical music. He became a record producer and founded his own label, Cedille Records, based in Chicago.

After Ruth Bader Ginsburg had served 13 years on the Court of Appeals, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court of the United States. She would fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Byron White, who had served since the Kennedy administration. Ginsburg was only the second woman to be named to the Supreme Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor, and was the first Jewish woman to serve. In her Senate confirmation hearings, Ginsburg declined to answer questions concerning her personal views on a number of controversial issues, or to discuss how she might rule in hypothetical cases. She insisted this reticence was essential to maintaining her open-mindedness and integrity as a jurist. Subsequent nominees to the Court have, for the most part, followed her example. The Senate confirmed her appointment by a vote of 96 to three.

On the high court, Justice Ginsburg was often called on to rule in cases regarding the rights of women and issues of gender equality. In 1996, she joined the majority in United States v. Virginia, ruling that the state could not continue to operate an all-male educational institution (the Virginia Military Institute) with taxpayer dollars. She also joined in the majority opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), striking down a Nebraska law banning so-called "partial birth" abortions. She dissented vehemently in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire (2007), in which an Alabama woman sued unsuccessfully for back pay to compensate for the years in which she had been paid substantially less than junior male colleagues performing the same job. The U.S. Congress would later address the issue of pay equity through legislation known as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. requested that his oath of office be administered to him by Justice Ginsburg when he was sworn in for his second term as Vice President. Ginsburg dissented in Bush v. Gore (2000), the case that ended the Florida recount and effectively decided the 2000 presidential election. Although she was usually identified as a member of the Court's liberal wing, Ginsbur enjoyed good relationships with more conservative members of the Court, including her only female predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor, and her longtime friend and fellow opera lover, Antonin Scalia.

During her years of service, Justice Ginsburg was faced with daunting personal challenges. In 1999, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, all without missing a day of service on the bench. Ten years later, she was diagnosed with early-stage pancreatic cancer, and was back in court within 12 days of her successful operation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg recovered from these episodes, but in 2010, her husband Martin succumbed to cancer four days after their 56th wedding anniversary.

Following Justice O'Connor's retirement, and subsequent replacement by Samuel Alito, Justice Ginsburg became for a time the only female member of the Supreme Court. In later years she has been pleased to welcome not one but two new female members of the Court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Over the years Justice Ginsburg was embraced by many Americans as a feminist icon and an exemplar of moral courage in the pursuit of social justice. Her life and work were celebrated in books such as the playful 2015 biography The Notorious RBG, and in the 2018 feature film, On the Basis of Sex, which portrays her early career and the landmark sex discrimination case of Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

Justice Ginsburg persevered in serving on the court through recurrences of her cancer, promising to remain on the bench as long as she was able to serve. She died at her home in Washington, D.C. at the age of 87. The announcement of her passing called forth an outpouring of public sentiment. That evening, a crowd of admirers gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to pay tribute to a champion of equal justice under law.

Inducted in 1995

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her career as an attorney, America's courtrooms and law firms were virtually all-male preserves. Female attorneys were a rarity, female judges were almost unheard of, and in many states women were routinely dismissed from jury duty.

As one of the few women studying at Harvard Law School in the 1950s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to justify taking a place in the class that could be filled by a man. Despite her outstanding academic record, law firms refused to hire her, and a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would not employ her as his clerk solely because of her sex.

Despite these obstacles, she became one of the nation's foremost legal scholars and a highly effective advocate for the equality of the sexes. She argued a series of historic cases before the Supreme Court, establishing the equal citizenship rights of men and women. In 1993, she herself was appointed to the nation's highest court, where she served for 27 years, ruling on the issues of constitutional law that define the rights of all Americans.

(Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was interviewed twice by the American Academy of Achievement at the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. - on August 17, 2010 and July 14, 2016. The following transcript draws on both video interviews.) Justice Ginsburg, when did you decide to become a lawyer?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Oh, it was sometime I guess around the end of my second year - maybe the beginning of my third year - at Cornell.

It was a tax case. Marty came into the bedroom where I worked and said, "Ruth, I think you should read this decision." And my response was, "Marty, you know that I don't read tax cases." He said, "Read this one." I did. It was the story of a man who was never married. He took care of his then-93-year-old mother. And he took what the Internal Revenue Code allowed as a babysitter's deduction, which you could take for the care of an elderly infirm relative of any age. So he took this $600 deduction, and he was audited by the IRS, and they said you can't take that deduction. He said, "Oh, I've been told that there's an elder care just like there's a baby care." The people who qualified for the deduction were any woman or a widowed or divorced man. Charles E. Moritz was a never-married man. He took his case to the tax court pro se. He represented himself and he filed a brief, which was a model. No lawyer would have done such a thing, but it was just right. He said, "If I had been a dutiful daughter, I would get this deduction. I'm a dutiful son. This makes no sense." And the tax court judge in his opinion said, "I glean that the taxpayer is making a Constitutional argument," but the next words were to the effect, "Everyone knows that the Internal Revenue Code is immune from Constitutional attack." So as soon as I read that decision, I said, "Marty, let's take it." And that's how Charles E. Moritz became our client.

I call the Moritz brief the grandparent brief. First, I understood the likely reception to my argument that it's gender-based discrimination, what was then called sex-based discrimination: "What are you talking about? Women have the best of all possible worlds. Think of jury duty. Yes, we don't put them on the jury rolls, but if they want to serve, they can go to the clerk's office and sign up and we will add them. So they don't have to serve. Women are on a pedestal. They are sheltered. They are protected. And men have to go out into the large cold world and earn a living." The laws, the statutes, both state and federal, reflected that difference. A good name for it is the separate spheres mentality.

Do you remember getting the call telling you that President Clinton wanted to interview you for a Supreme Court vacancy? There was a fashion issue...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Oh, because I had just come in from - I was in Vermont for a wedding. And the White House Counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, said, "Come meet the President. Don't worry if you're in your travel clothes. He will be coming in off the golf course." So when I came to the White House, and the president walked in, he was not in his golf clothes, he was in his Sunday best. He had just come back from church. So I was kind of embarrassed by the way I looked.
It didn't seem to harm anything.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: But it worked out just fine. Yes.

After Sandra Day O'Connor retired from the Court, you were the only woman for several years. You dissented more frequently. Finally there was the day that the Court heard the case of Savanna Redding. In your very understated way, you blew a gasket. What was it about that case that made you so mad?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Savanna Redding was a 13-year-old girl. She was in the eighth grade, and she was suspected of having given pills to a classmate. The pills turned out to be Advil, but Savanna was taken to the girl's bathroom and strip-searched. And then when the strip search was over and they found no pills, she was made to sit in a chair outside the principal's office for two hours until they called her mother and said, "Pick her up." Her mother was infuriated. And she sued the school district for humiliating her daughter that way. And the question was, "Had the school district violated her civil rights?" The Court answered yes to that question. But the next question is, "Should there be damages, because the principal should have known that this behavior was unlawful?" and the Court said no damages. The principal is cloaked with immunity because we have never had a case like this before so he didn't know. He didn't know that what was done was unlawful. And that's when I said, "Anyone who reads the Fourth Amendment protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, humiliating that 13-year-old girl in that way was the most unreasonable search." There were jokes about the boys in the locker room, and the boys unclothed in front of each other, and nobody thought anything of it. And I think I said from the bench that 13 is a vulnerable age for a girl, and a 13-year-old girl is not like a 13-year-old boy. This is overwhelming humiliation for her. And I think when I said something to that effect, then the jokes stopped. There were no more jokes about the boys in the locker room. I suppose my colleagues thought of their daughters, thought of their wives, and realized then that the point I was making was well-taken.

I want to talk to you for a moment about your husband, Marty. How long were you married?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We were married for 56 years when he died. Yes.
He was a master chef, a master tax lawyer and law professor, and your biggest booster. You've said that, from the very beginning, he was not just in your corner - it was something more than that.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Marty was always my biggest booster. He was a remarkable man. He was so sure of his own ability that he never regarded me as any kind of threat. On the contrary, I suppose he thought, "Well, if I decided I want to spend my life with her, she must be pretty good!" So he was at every stage of my life my strongest supporter.
The day after he died in 2010, you were on the bench. It was close to the end of the term and you were announcing an important decision that you'd written. You didn't have to be there. Somebody could have announced the decision for you.
You've spent your life in the law. Were there lawyers in your family?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: There were no lawyers in my family. My father came to the United States from Russia when he was 13, and apart from night school to learn English, he had no formal schooling. My mother was the sixth child to be born in her large family, and the first one born in the U.S.A. She was born four months after her parents arrived.
From where?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: From Austria. And she was a very good student; she graduated high school at age 15 and then went immediately to work so that she could help support the eldest son, who was going to Cornell University. In those families, the eldest son was the one on whom the most attention was lavished, and no one thought about sending girls to higher education.
Did she work while you were growing up?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: No, because, I think my mother would have thrived had she worked. But when she was married, it was considered a disgrace to a man that his wife worked. It would mean that he was unable to support her. So she stopped working when she married, but she was always helpful to my father in his work. In fact, when she died - she died when I was 17, just before I was to graduate from high school - when she died his business went downhill, because she was a very important part of keeping it afloat.
What was his business?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was a manufacturer of furs.
What kind of student were you? You went to public schools, we understand.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I went to P.S. 238 in Brooklyn and to James Madison High School in Brooklyn. I was a good student, in some part to please my mother. I wanted to bring home a report card that she would find satisfactory.
What was your mother like?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My mother was a voracious reader. And one gift that she gave me was loving to read. My favorite memory was sitting on her lap, she would read books to me. We had a daily - a weekly excursion to the public library. And she would leave me in the library in the children's section, have her hair done, and then pick me up when I had my three or four books for the week.
You spoke about her on the day you were nominated to the Court in the Rose Garden. What do you think she would make of you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think she would be surprised - and no end pleased. My mother was born in an era when it was a disgrace for a married woman to work, if her husband could support her. And so my mother ,who started working when she was 15 - she graduated high school at 15 - went immediately to work, so she could help the family while the eldest son went off to Cornell. He was the only one in the family that had a college education. So then she did not work once she married. I think she wished that she had been able to continue.
Do you remember enjoying particular books when you were growing up?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well written, they weren't, but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn't have to take a back seat or be wallflowers. So the Nancy Drew series was important to me. When I was even younger, I loved mythology. I loved Greek mythology and Norse mythology.
So then you go off to Cornell. What was that like?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Cornell in the early '50s was considered a great school for girls because there were four men to every woman. It was a strict quota system. That meant the women were ever so much smarter than the boys. But it wasn't the thing to do to show how smart you were. It was much better that you gave the impression that you weren't working at all, that you were a party girl. So I did my studying in various bathrooms on the campus. Then when I went back to the dormitory, I didn't have homework to do.
You had some wonderful professors, and you've talked about your literature professor in particular, who is a pretty famous guy.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Nabokov. Yes.
Vladimir Nabokov?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. Vladimir, the author of Lolita and many other things. He was a man who was in love with the sound of words, and he would read aloud from the books that were assigned, and showed us how a writer could paint pictures with words and how important having the right word in the right place would be. He gave an example of why he liked writing in the English language. I'm not sure that his first language was Russian. It may have been French. But the example that he gave was if you're speaking French and you want to refer to a white horse so you say cheval blanc, first you see the horse and "horse" stimulates "brown" in your mind. Then you have to readjust it with "white." But in English, "white" comes before "horse," so you see the white horse immediately. That was the kind of thing that was important to Nabokov. He was a marvelous teacher, wonderfully amusing.
At Cornell, you met Marty Ginsburg. At first you were just friends, but you realized pretty soon that he was different than the other boys.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. I many times said that Marty Ginsburg was the first boy I met who cared that I had a brain.
And he liked that you had a brain.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was extraordinary in that respect. Yes.
When you married Marty, you got a second mother, his mother. She gave you some important advice that you say has served you well through life.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: My mother-in-law's advice, which she gave me on the day of our wedding - we were married in Marty's home, and his mother took me into the bedroom, her bedroom and said, "Dear, I'd like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage." "Yes. What is the secret?" "It helps sometimes to be a little deaf." And I found that advice - it stood me in very good stead not only in a wonderful marriage that lasted well over half a century, but in every workplace I've served, dealing with my faculty colleagues when I was a law teacher, and even now with my colleagues on the Supreme Court. When an unkind word is said, a thoughtless word, best to tune out.
The two of you ended up at Harvard Law School. You were one of nine women in your first year at Harvard. And you weren't exactly greeted with open arms, were you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: The nine of us were greeted by the dean, Dean Erwin, at a dinner he held in his home. He invited the nine women, and each of us had a faculty escort. My escort was Herbert Wexler, later my colleague at Columbia. He was a man who looked more like God than anyone I'd ever seen. I was totally taken with him but intimidated because he was so brilliant. Anyway, we had a meal. It was not a memorable meal. And there was no wine because the dean was a teetotaler. And then he had the chairs in his living room arranged in a semicircle and asked each of us in turn to say what we were doing at the Harvard Law School occupying a seat that could be held by a man. And most of us were embarrassed by the question, but years later when the dean became a friend, I realized what he was trying to do. The dean was not known for his sense of humor. Harvard didn't admit women until 1950-'51, was the first year the law school admitted women. There were still doubting Thomases on the faculty. And the dean wanted to be armed with stories from the women themselves about what they would do with a law degree. So that's why he asked the question. Of course, the women in my class didn't exactly comprehend that at the time, but one of them gave him a perfect answer. Mine was far from perfect. But this was Flora Schnall. She had a distinguished career as a lawyer. She said, "Dean Griswold, there are nine of us. Well, really Ruth Ginsburg doesn't count for this purpose. So there are eight, and there are over 500 of them. What better place to find a man?" And the dean, I think, was horrified by that answer, but she was the only one who treated it in the way it should have been treated.

For the most part, my professors treated the women in the class fairly. There was no such thing as "Ladies' Day" in any of my classes. "Ladies' Day" was notorious in law schools. It was the day when only women were called on and the rest of the year they were ignored. I did not have that experience, but I did have this experience: The nine of us were divided into four sections, so that meant most of us were in a room with just one other woman. If we were called on, we worried that if we failed, if we didn't give the right answer, we would be failing not just for ourselves, but for all women. It is somewhat similar to people saying, when a car takes a wrong turn, "What would you expect? It's a woman driver." So we were on our toes. We were always well prepared. Years later, when women were beginning to come to law school in numbers in the 1970s, I was then teaching at Columbia, and one of my colleagues said that he really longed for the good old days when there were few women in the class, because he said if things were going slowly and you needed a crisp right answer, you called on the woman. She was always prepared. She would give you the right answer and then the class could move along. "But nowadays," he said, "there's no difference. The women are as unprepared as the men."
At Harvard you and Marty had a three-year-old daughter.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Jane was 14 months when I started.
So you have a daughter. You were eventually on law review. You're juggling schedules, and he's diagnosed with testicular cancer, which at the time was a very serious thing. We have much better ways of treating that now.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Daily radiation that seemed to go on forever. The doctor said four weeks, and then four weeks were over, and there was a fifth week and a sixth week. It was the only thing they had. It was massive radiation. It wasn't pinpointed the way it is today.
How did you get through this time? He was very sick. You were taking care of him. You were typing his papers. You were getting notes from his classes. You were taking care of Jane. How did the two of you get through this period?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We never thought about the possibility or never talked about the possibility that he might not survive. We were concentrating on getting him through the third year. And by the way, Marty went to classes for only two weeks, the last two weeks of the semester. In that semester he got the highest grades that he ever got in law school because he had the best tutors. And Harvard was known as a competitive place. My experience was the opposite. His classmates, my classmates rallied around the two of us and prepared individual tutorials to help prepare him for the exams. How did I get through it? Well, I was able to get by with very little sleep. Because of the radiation, Marty couldn't ingest anything until midnight. And so between midnight and two he had dinner, my bad hamburger usually. And then he would dictate to me his senior paper, and then he'd go back to sleep. And it was about 2:00 when I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to read to be prepared for classes the next day.
Was this the beginning of the schedule you keep now, when you work all night and don't get up until noon unless you're on the bench?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, except in those days I was much younger so I could get up early in the morning in time to make my first class, which sometimes was 8:00.
A famous Justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, was asked to consider hiring you as one of his law clerks. You had amazing qualifications, having been on the law reviews of both Columbia and Harvard. You were recommended by a Harvard professor. And you tied for first place in your graduating class at Columbia. What was Justice Frankfurter's reaction?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Justice Frankfurter, like his colleagues, was just not prepared to hire a woman. Now these were pre-Title VII days, so there was nothing unlawful about discriminating against women. And gentlemen of a certain age at that time felt that they would be discomfited by a woman in chambers, that they might have to watch what they say, they might have to censor their speech. It was surprising that Frankfurter had that typical, in those days, reaction, because he was the first justice to hire an African American as a law clerk some years before. But as I said, like many other federal judges of the time, he just wasn't prepared to hire a woman.
The famous Judge Learned Hand told you why he wouldn't hire you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Judge Learned Hand was a brilliant jurist, and I wanted to clerk for him more than anything, even more than for a Supreme Court Justice. And my judge, Judge Palmieri, he lived around the corner from Judge Hand and would drive Judge Hand into work and back. And whenever I was finished early enough, I would join them on that ride. I'd sit in the back of the car. And this great man would say anything that came into his head. He sang songs at the top of his lungs. He used words that I never heard. And I asked him, "Judge Hand, I don't seem to inhibit your speech when you're in the car. Why won't you consider me as a law clerk?" And he said, "Young lady, I am not looking at you." For a man of that time, of that age, you didn't use bad language in front of a lady.

When I applied for law firm jobs, Columbia had an excellent placement office, but sign-up sheets would go up and many would say "men only." I had, as I have sometimes explained, three strikes that put me out when it came to employment as a lawyer. One is I am Jewish and the law firms were just beginning to stop discriminating on the basis of religion. That affected Catholics as well as Jews. They were opening up to all people without regard to religion. And some, a precious few, were ready to try a woman, but none were willing to take a chance on a mother, and my daughter was four years old when I graduated from law school. So of course I was disappointed, but it wasn't unexpected.
You've said that Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex made a great impression on you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex the first time I was in Sweden. And I was observing a society that was more advanced than we were in recognizing women's talent and capacities. At that time, 1962, women were less than three percent of the law students in the United States. They were already 20 percent in Sweden. There was a woman writing a column in the Stockholm daily paper to this effect: why should the woman have two jobs and the man only one? In Sweden it was already not only accepted but expected that there would be two-earner families. Inflation was high, and if you wanted to do well by your children, you needed two incomes. But she was expected to have dinner on the table at seven, buy the children's new shoes, take them for the medical checkups and the rest. And this columnist, whose name was Eva Moberg, her question was, "Shouldn't he do more than take out the garbage?" And there were many, many people talking about that. So I was listening to these conversations at the same time as I was reading The Second Sex, which is an eye opener.
Why is it an eye opener?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Because of the irrational differences. She shows the differences between the way women are treated, the way men are treated, and it doesn't inevitably have to be that way. There were some societies that she commented on where the woman is the queen bee.
So you ended up eventually as a professor at Rutgers Law School, where you actually hid your own pregnancy.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That was a wonderful thing that happened because Marty was told after all that radiation that it would be impossible for us to have a second child. So that was very good news. But there was no amniocentesis at the time, and we didn't know what James would turn out to be. But in any event, at that time it was my second year at Rutgers. I had a year-to-year contract. And I was pretty sure that if I told them I was pregnant, I wouldn't get a contract for the next year. So I wore my mother-in-law's clothes. It was just right. She was one size larger. And I got through the spring semester. When I had the new contract in hand, I told my colleagues when I came back in the fall, there would be one more in our family. So they stopped thinking that I was gaining a lot of weight.
You have said that, in a sense, you yourself were a product of affirmative action in being hired by Columbia in the early 1960s. Were they looking to diversify their faculty?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. The Women's Movement came alive in the United States in the late '60s, and the government in those days was heavily into affirmative action. People don't remember that affirmative action became a major item during Nixon's administration, and it started in the construction trades, which were highly exclusionary. There was a good deal of nepotism, so you got a starting job as an apprentice if your father or your uncle was a member of the union.

And it was Nixon's Secretary of Labor who thought that the best way to break that exclusion was to have people who have contracts with government - and many people do - pledge to do two things. One was to set goals and timetables, the assumption was, now let's assume there would be no discrimination, about how many members of a minority group might be expected. So you set that number as the goal and a timetable for when you would achieve it. And this was not something that was absolute. If there was a good reason why you couldn't comply, so be it.

But it was necessary for people who held government contracts at least to make an effort. And most colleges and universities had government money of some sort. There was a very active office for civil rights in the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare. And the head of that office was a man named Stan Pottinger. He was visiting colleges and universities all over America to encourage them to fulfill their affirmative action obligations, and also to remind them that if they didn't, there was a possibility that their contracts might be suspended or even terminated. So in the year 1972 Columbia named two people to the faculty. One was an African American man and one was a woman, the first ever hired in a tenured post.
And that was you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes.
How is it, going back to your alma mater, going back to Columbia?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I go to Columbia regularly. I have a very close tie to Columbia because my daughter is on the Columbia Law School faculty, and a former law clerk is the dean. David Schizer is the Dean of the Columbia Law School. His mother was a classmate of mine at Columbia. So I have strong connections to the Columbia Law School.
And he was a law clerk of yours?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. David Schizer, who is now the Dean of Columbia Law School. My second year on the Supreme Court - so it would have been 1994 to '95 - he was my very excellent law clerk.
When you became the first tenured woman on the faculty of Columbia Law School, did you feel some resentment from fellow faculty members, or by then was it more accepted?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I had a great deal of support from my faculty colleagues. None of them were resentful. Most of them were so secure about themselves and the excellence of the Columbia faculty, their idea was that if Columbia decided to engage me to be a tenured professor, then I must be really good. And even if I were doing things that they didn't, that they would disagree with, they were backing me up. One example: I was named the law school's representative on the university senate. Women who were teaching in the university had a suspicion that they were not getting equal pay, so the start to finding out if that suspicion was right was finding out just what salaries the university was paying. And the administration's answer was that's secret information, all kinds of jealousies would result if we published them. And of course, you couldn't find out if Columbia was meeting its equal pay obligations without that information, which we eventually got, and the suspicions proved right.
That you were paid less than your male colleagues.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I wasn't, because coming on in 1972 they made certain that I would be treated as well as my male peers. But women who had worked at the university for years, who came on in the days when it was accepted to pay women less.
And these were faculty members?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Faculty or top administrators. The hardest thing for my colleagues to accept was when we - and by we, I mean the ACLU women's rights project, which I helped to found - challenged the TIAA CREF program, and the retirement program used by most colleges and universities, because they rigidly separated the policy beneficiaries by sex. So they used mortality tables for men, for women. And the women would get less when they retired than a man with equivalent salary and time in service. The reason was that on average it's fair, because women on average live longer than men. And my view was, "Yes, that's certainly true on average, but there are some men who live long and some women who die early." And the whole notion is that you don't lump together women simply because they are women, and that TIAA CREF should merge their mortality tables. Well, the immediate response was, "Horrors! We just couldn't do that! Then all the men would desert the plan and get private insurance." Well, TIAA CREF was such a good deal that when they did finally merge the tables, nobody left. But that was the most worrisome thing to my faculty colleagues. Even so, they supported a class action that was brought with 100 named plaintiffs on behalf of women teachers and administrators at Columbia, charging that maintaining separate mortality tables essentially denied women equal pay, and was in violation of our foremost anti-discrimination law: Title VII.
Justice Ginsburg, may we ask what you are most proud of having accomplished so far in your career?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I was fortunate to be born at the right time and to be in the right place when the Women's Movement came alive. So many things were wrong with the way life was ordered in the '70s. In many states, women didn't serve on juries, to take just one example, and there were so many jobs that were off limits to women. People began to realize there was something wrong about that, and women should be free to aspire and achieve just as men are. So I had legal education, and I could use that education to help move this movement for change, for allowing women to realize their full potential, help move that along. So it was that ten years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about - I don't say women's rights - I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women. I was tremendously fortunate to be able to participate in that movement for change.
You eventually went to Columbia, where you formed the ACLU Women's Project, and you brought a whole series of cases. You often liked to have male clients. Why was that?
Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Like Charles E. Moritz, like Stephen Wiesenfeld. Stephen Wiesenfeld's case was even more compelling than Charles E. Moritz. Stephen Wiesenfeld's wife died in childbirth. She had been a school teacher. She earned slightly more than he did. When she died, Stephen went to the Social Security office. He thought that if he worked part-time up to the ceiling that Social Security allowed you to earn, the Social Security benefits plus what he could earn on top of that, he could just about make it and take care of his child and not go to work full-time until the child was in school a full day. So he went to the Social Security office and asked for what he was told were child-in-care benefits. And he was told, "We're very sorry, Mr. Wiesenfeld. Those are mother's benefits. They're not available to fathers." So he was the person who immediately felt the effect of the law. But where did that discrimination begin? It began with the woman as wage earner. Women paid the same Social Security tax that men paid, but it didn't net for their family the same protection. Same tax but unequal protection. So we could say Stephen Wiesenfeld is feeling the effect of this discrimination, but it began with his wife, the wage earner, who was not treated as a full wage earner. She was a woman wage earner, and that meant she was secondary, she was earning pin money, no Social Security benefits for her family when she dies.

So the woman was discriminated against as wage earner, the male as parent, and that conformed to what was the basic separation that the man was the breadwinner, the woman was responsible for care of the home and children. So again, we never challenged how life was for most people. We said stereotypes, while there are stereotypes that are true in general, but there were many people who don't fit the mold. And the whole object in the 1970s - through first public education - then attempt to change the laws by going to the state legislatures and Congress, and finally the courts were there as a last resort.

The idea I think was best expressed in a song that Ms. magazine published, and I think it was Marlo Thomas who was involved. The song is Free to be You and Me, and that was the idea. That male or female, you should be free to follow your star, to develop your talent, and you shouldn't be held back by artificial barriers.
You said that some laws that would seem, on the surface, to help women, in a way discriminate, because it implies that women need more help than men.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That women need to be protected. That was true. Our legislation said women couldn't work more than eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. And that might have been fine in the days of sweatshops when some employers required women to work six days a week, 12 hours a day. But over the years, especially with unions protecting workers, the workday shrunk from 12 hours to ten hours to eight. And then if an employer wanted more hours, the employer would have to pay time-and-a-half or double time for those additional hours. So the hours laws that started out to protect women from sweatshop conditions ended up protecting men's jobs from women's competition. If an employer has two choices, a woman who cannot be engaged to work overtime and a man who is willing to do that, he would pick the man. So the protections over time came to be not protections, but barriers for women.

To take another simple example, women couldn't be engaged to work at night. No night work. Well, if a woman is a waitress, the most lucrative tips - at banquets and such - come in the evening, not at lunchtime. So women came to realize that these old-style protections were not genuine protections for women, but they helped to keep things the way they were where there was this sharp divide between what women do and what men do, and the notion was to break down those stereotypes. So if a man wants to go to a nursing school, then that's okay, that's fine. And if a woman wants to be an engineer, a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, that's fine too. And now it's not at all extraordinary for a woman to be any of those things.
You argued six cases before the Supreme Court and you won five of them. You wrote briefs in dozens more. What were you trying to achieve in the Oklahoma case Craig v. Boren?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The "near-beer" case, Craig against Boren. Well, when we started out, there were two levels of review of cases that relied on the equal protection principle. One level was the highest. It was labeled strict scrutiny. It was reserved for discrimination on the basis of race. Everyone knew that racial discrimination was odious, should not be permitted. So a racial classification that adversely affected the minority race got this high level of review, was looked at very suspiciously. Everything else, the test was "rational basis," which some people say, "Rational basis, all you have to do to get a law accepted by the Supreme Court is pass the lunatic test. If it isn't lunatic, then it's okay. Then Congress has the authority to do that."

We needed to ratchet up that level. And incidentally, I looked at all of the Supreme Court cases involving equal protection and was able to get out some phrases here and there that suggested a higher level of review, something more than the lunatic test. So our object was to ratchet up the review standard for gender-based discrimination. It was interesting that in the turning point case, Reed v. Reed, the Court didn't even mention that it was doing something new, that the law in question, yes, it would have passed the rational basis test, but they held it was no good. This was a law of the State of Idaho that said as between persons equally entitled to administer a decedent's estate, males must be preferred to females. Simple as that. And the rival contenders in that case were Sally Reed and Cecil Reed. They had a teenage son. They were divorced. When the boy was what the law calls "of tender years," when he was young, the mother had custody. When the boy reached his teens, the father said, "Now he needs to be prepared for a man's world so I should be the custodian." Sally didn't like that idea at all, but she objected in vain. Sadly she turned out to be right. The boy, living with his father, became terribly depressed and one day took out one of his father's many guns and committed suicide. So Sally wanted to be appointed administrator to his estate. She couldn't. Why? Males must be preferred to females. Why would we have such a law? Because in the ancient days in the 19 th century, before the Married Women's Property Acts were passed, women - if they married - couldn't sue and be sued, they couldn't make contracts in their own name, they couldn't hold property in their own name. So if you had a choice between two people to be the administrator of the decedent's estate, of course you'd pick the competent person, one who can make contracts, the one who can hold property, the one who can sue and be sued. That's why there were such laws on the books.
When you were litigating all these cases, running the ACLU project, arguing cases in the Supreme Court, your son was getting in trouble all the time at school.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My son was a lively child. I called him lively. His teachers called him hyperactive. And I would get calls at least once a month to please come down to the school to meet with the room teacher or the school psychologist or the principal to hear about my son's latest escapade. And one day I was at my office in Columbia, very tired because I had stayed up all night writing a brief. And I got the call. This time I said, "This child has two parents. Please alternate calls. And this time it's his father's turn." So Marty went down to the school. He left his law office, met with three stone faces who disclosed my son's latest offense. What did he do? He stole the elevator. It was a hand-held elevator that the elevator operator - in those days people were still smoking - the operator went out to have a cigarette, and one of my son's classmates dared him to take a group of kindergarteners up to the top floor in the elevator, which he did. So Marty's response on being told that your son stole the elevator was, "How far could he take it?" So I don't know whether it was Marty's wonderful sense of humor or the reluctance of the school to call a father away from his work, but then we got the calls barely once a semester, although there was no quick change in James's behavior. People were much more reluctant to take a man away from his work than a woman.
You give a great deal of credit for the abortion decision and the affirmative action decision this term, and a couple of decisions last term, to one of the more conservative members of the court, Justice Kennedy. The abortion decision you said was particularly difficult for him.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was very difficult for him, but I think he sensed that what was going on with those restrictions, they were severe restrictions that it was a sham to say they protected women's health. What they did was make access to abortion almost impossible for many poor women - or access to a safe abortion - thus driving them to back-alley abortionists the way it was in the not-so-good old days. So I thought that the Court recognizing that that kind of legislation simply would not pass constitutional review was very important. I think both the affirmative action decision and the whole women's health case, the access to abortion, they kind of quieted the turmoil that was going on. How was the Court going to rule? This way or that way? I think, for the nonce, we will not have any major cases in either field because the Court spoke. I think both decisions were excellent, very well-reasoned, and will be accepted.
When you joined Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, you were the second woman. She was the first. And even though she was a Reagan appointee and you were a Clinton appointee, you had a bond right away.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: She was almost like a big sister to me. Sandra Day O'Connor is a truly great woman. When I came onboard she told me just what I needed to know to be able to manage those first weeks. She didn't douse me with a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn't possibly retain. At so many stages of my life she gave me good counsel. When I had colorectal cancer, Sandra had had breast cancer. She had massive surgery. She was in court hearing argument nine days after her surgery. So her advice to me was, "Ruth, you're having chemotherapy. Schedule it for Friday so then by Monday you'll be over it. You'll be over the bad effects." That's how she was. Anything that came her way, she would deal with it. She would just do it.
Justice O'Connor did a very generous thing for you, relatively early in your tenure, when the Court heard the VMI case testing whether the Virginia Military Institute could exclude women.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Virginia Military Institute is a fine school. It offers an incredible opportunity, but it limited that opportunity to men. There were women who were ready, willing, and able to go through that arduous training. What they wanted more than anything else was the kind of old-boy network. The VMI alums are very loyal. They try to help the graduates on their way. And I think only about 15 percent of VMI graduates end up with military careers. The rest are in business and commerce. So it was an important opportunity that was not open to women, and there was nothing comparable for them. I wanted to write the decision. And by the way, the name of the case is revealing. It was "United States against Virginia." It was the United States Government that was suing the state of Virginia, saying, "State of Virginia, you can't offer an educational opportunity to one sex only." I was rather low on the totem pole. In fact, I did get the assignment because Justice O'Connor said Ruth should write this case. I think she had considerable seniority then, and so she would have been the logical person to get the assignment, but she said I should write it.
Another one of your friends, not just on the Supreme Court but on the Court of Appeals before that, was Justice Scalia. He was the sole dissenter in that case, but you've said that he did you a favor in that case.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He came into my chambers with what he said was the penultimate draft of his dissent in the VMI case. He said he wasn't quite ready to circulate it to the Court. It needed more polishing. But the term was getting on toward the end and he wanted to give me as much time as he possibly could to answer his dissent. I was about to go off to my circuit judicial conference. I took the opinion draft with me. I started reading it on the plane to Albany, and it was - even for Scalia - it was a real zinger. It was. So I spent the whole weekend thinking about how I would - in a restrained and moderate way - answer to these comments. I mean he took me to task for everything. I had a footnote in which I referred to "the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia." He said, "We must excuse this Justice who is probably more familiar with schools in New York where they may have a campus here and a campus there. There is no Charlottesville campus. There is only the University of Virginia. Period." The greatest thing for me was to have a Scalia dissent. He would point out all the soft spots, and that would give me an opportunity to improve the opinion to make it more persuasive than it was before I got this stimulating dissent.
After the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized gay marriage, you attended a social occasion along with Justice Scalia and ended up singing together, didn't you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was the day of the same-sex marriage case. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the Court. I joined him. Justice Scalia dissented vigorously. That's an understatement. And yet we were all together that evening at this wonderful dinner that Catherine and Wayne Reynolds had. The head of NIH took out his guitar. Renee Fleming began to sing with him. And everybody joined in. So there was Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia, and I was there too, all singing rather raucously, "The times, they are a-changing."
There was an opera written about you and Scalia and your conservative liberal friendship. You had a couple of favorite lines from one of the arias in the opera.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well first, in the Court everything goes by seniority, so the opera is Scalia/Ginsburg. Even though I was three years older than Justice Scalia, he was appointed several years before I was, so he comes first in the ranking. It opens with Scalia's rage aria. And for those who know music, it's straight out of Handel, real Handelian. And the words are: "The Justices are blind. How can they possibly spout this? The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this." And then my answering aria is: "Dear Justice Scalia, you are searching in vain for bright-line solutions to cases that have no easy answer, but the great thing about our Constitution is like our society, it can evolve." And then the opera switches into a jazz mode, and the singer goes on, "Let it grow, let it grow!"
What does the American Dream mean to you, Justice Ginsburg?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: How can I describe the American Dream? Maybe it's captured by the first ride I took on a New York subway, after returning from several months in Sweden, where everybody looked the same, and here I was on the subway, and the amazing diversity of the people of the United States. You know the motto is E pluribus unum - "Of many, one" - and that's the idea that, more than just tolerating, we can appreciate our differences and yet pull together for the long haul. So that is my idea of the American Dream, sometimes referred to as "the melting pot." That's not quite right, because we keep our individual identities, but we are all Americans, and proud to live in the land of the free.
This is a historic moment for the Supreme Court, an unprecedented three Supreme Court justices are women, something Justice Frankfurter would have been very surprised by. Talk about how that might affect the future.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It's obvious now that women are really here and we're here to stay, just as men are. We are not one or two at a time curiosities. So I think this is an exhilarating change. When I was a new justice on this court for the twelve years that I sat together with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, invariably one lawyer or another would call me Justice O'Connor. They had become accustomed to a woman on the court and Justice O'Connor was the woman, so if they heard a woman's voice - well, that must be the lady justice, even though we don't look alike, we don't sound alike. But last year no one called Justice Sotomayor Justice Ginsburg or me Justice Sotomayor, and I am certain that lawyers will perceive the difference among the three of us and we will each have our individual identities. We're not quite where the Supreme Court of Canada is. The Supreme Court of Canada also has nine justices: four are women, including their chief justice. I think we will not be too far behind.
What do you think is the next frontier in women's rights or civil rights? Where do we still need to go?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The hardest barrier to surmount for most women, I think it's no longer at the entry level of any job, no longer access to any educational facility. I think, for example, that Justice Kagan did not encounter any discrimination in admissions to college, law school, getting a job, getting a clerkship. But what is very hard for most women is what happens when children are born. Will men become equal parents, sharing the joys as well as the burdens of bringing up the next generation? But that's my dream for the world, for every child to have two loving parents who share in raising the child. And now, I think I have to go back to work.
Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Gallery

Ruth Joan Bader was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother Celia was born in the United States to immigrant parents newly arrived from Austria; her father Nathan immigrated to the United States from Russia at age 13. The Baders' first daughter died when Ruth was only two.

Although Nathan Bader never attended high school, he achieved some success as a fur manufacturer, while Celia worked in the home and helped with the family business. While Mrs. Bader never pursued a career of her own, she encouraged Ruth's scholarly and professional ambitions, taking her to the library every week to keep her supplied with books. Celia Bader suffered from poor health throughout Ruth's teen years, dying of cancer the day before Ruth graduated from James Madison High School.

At Cornell University, Ruth Bader earned a bachelor's degree with high honors in government and distinction in all subjects. It was also at Cornell that she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, on a blind date. They were married shortly after Ruth Bader's graduation, and lived in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Ginsburg completed his military service. Following his discharge, he started legal studies at Harvard, and 14 months after the birth of their daughter, Jane, Ruth too entered Harvard Law School.

One of only nine women in a class of more than 500, Ruth encountered resistance from some of the older faculty. The law dean asked all the women students to justify taking places at the school that could be occupied by men. While attending Harvard, Martin Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During his illness, Ruth attended his classes, as well as her own, and typed all his papers. Even with the added responsibility of caring for her ailing husband and their child, she won a coveted seat on the Harvard Law Review. Martin Ginsburg made a complete recovery, and after completing his studies at Harvard, joined a law firm in New York City. In the next few years, he became a highly regarded expert on tax law.

To keep her young family together, Ruth Ginsburg transferred to Columbia University in Manhattan for her last year of law school. At Columbia too, she won a seat on the law review. Serving on both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews was an unprecedented achievement for any law student, male or female. Ginsburg graduated from Columbia tied for first place in her class.

Despite this stellar academic record, she found her sex a barrier to career advancement. A firm that had employed her between terms at Harvard failed to provide a permanent position. Of the 12 firms with which she interviewed, not one offered her a job. Although Professor Albert Sachs of Harvard personally recommended her to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Justice declined to offer her the post of law clerk, apparently too uncomfortable with the thought of a woman in his chambers.

Ginsburg was eventually offered a clerkship with Judge Edmund G. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where she served from 1959 to 1961. Following this experience, she finally received several offers from major law firms, but instead returned to Columbia, to work on the law school's Project on International Procedure. She became associate director of the project, taught herself Swedish and traveled to the University of Lund to study the Swedish legal system. In 1963, she became a professor of law at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. While there, she completed a textbook, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), published the same year her son, James, was born. In 1970, Ginsburg co-founded The Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the United States devoted to gender equality issues. Two years later, she moved from Rutgers to Columbia University Law School, and became the first woman to receive tenure there. In 1973, she argued her first case before the United States Supreme Court. After the American Civil Liberties Union referred a number of sex discrimination complaints to her, she founded the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. She became the project's general counsel, as well as serving on the national board of the ACLU. At the time, she was writing the first textbook on sex discrimination law, Text, Cases, and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination, published in 1974.

In these years, she also began to speak as a visiting lecturer at law schools and other institutions in the United States and Europe, including the law schools of Harvard and New York University, the Universities of Amsterdam and Strasbourg, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Ginsburg continued to appear frequently before the Supreme Court, arguing cases of sex discrimination. One of the most important of these was Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975). Stephen Wiesenfeld was a widower who had been denied the Social Security child support benefits that a woman would have received in the same situation. Her victory in this case was followed three years later by another in Duren v. Missouri. State law in Missouri had made jury duty compulsory for men but optional for women. Ginsburg argued that this devalued women's contribution as citizens, and once again Ginsburg's position prevailed. By this time, she had earned a national reputation as a leading advocate for the equal citizenship status of men and women.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Martin Ginsburg followed her to Washington, where he continued to practice tax law as well as becoming a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Their daughter, Jane Ginsburg, followed her parents into the legal profession, and became a law professor at Columbia. Their son, James, shared his mother's love of classical music. He became a record producer and founded his own label, Cedille Records, based in Chicago.

After Ruth Bader Ginsburg had served 13 years on the Court of Appeals, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court of the United States. She would fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Byron White, who had served since the Kennedy administration. Ginsburg was only the second woman to be named to the Supreme Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor, and was the first Jewish woman to serve. In her Senate confirmation hearings, Ginsburg declined to answer questions concerning her personal views on a number of controversial issues, or to discuss how she might rule in hypothetical cases. She insisted this reticence was essential to maintaining her open-mindedness and integrity as a jurist. Subsequent nominees to the Court have, for the most part, followed her example. The Senate confirmed her appointment by a vote of 96 to three.

On the high court, Justice Ginsburg was often called on to rule in cases regarding the rights of women and issues of gender equality. In 1996, she joined the majority in United States v. Virginia, ruling that the state could not continue to operate an all-male educational institution (the Virginia Military Institute) with taxpayer dollars. She also joined in the majority opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), striking down a Nebraska law banning so-called "partial birth" abortions. She dissented vehemently in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire (2007), in which an Alabama woman sued unsuccessfully for back pay to compensate for the years in which she had been paid substantially less than junior male colleagues performing the same job. The U.S. Congress would later address the issue of pay equity through legislation known as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. requested that his oath of office be administered to him by Justice Ginsburg when he was sworn in for his second term as Vice President. Ginsburg dissented in Bush v. Gore (2000), the case that ended the Florida recount and effectively decided the 2000 presidential election. Although she was usually identified as a member of the Court's liberal wing, Ginsbur enjoyed good relationships with more conservative members of the Court, including her only female predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor, and her longtime friend and fellow opera lover, Antonin Scalia.

During her years of service, Justice Ginsburg was faced with daunting personal challenges. In 1999, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, all without missing a day of service on the bench. Ten years later, she was diagnosed with early-stage pancreatic cancer, and was back in court within 12 days of her successful operation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg recovered from these episodes, but in 2010, her husband Martin succumbed to cancer four days after their 56th wedding anniversary.

Following Justice O'Connor's retirement, and subsequent replacement by Samuel Alito, Justice Ginsburg became for a time the only female member of the Supreme Court. In later years she has been pleased to welcome not one but two new female members of the Court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Over the years Justice Ginsburg was embraced by many Americans as a feminist icon and an exemplar of moral courage in the pursuit of social justice. Her life and work were celebrated in books such as the playful 2015 biography The Notorious RBG, and in the 2018 feature film, On the Basis of Sex, which portrays her early career and the landmark sex discrimination case of Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

Justice Ginsburg persevered in serving on the court through recurrences of her cancer, promising to remain on the bench as long as she was able to serve. She died at her home in Washington, D.C. at the age of 87. The announcement of her passing called forth an outpouring of public sentiment. That evening, a crowd of admirers gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to pay tribute to a champion of equal justice under law.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her career as an attorney, America's courtrooms and law firms were virtually all-male preserves. Female attorneys were a rarity, female judges were almost unheard of, and in many states women were routinely dismissed from jury duty.

As one of the few women studying at Harvard Law School in the 1950s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to justify taking a place in the class that could be filled by a man. Despite her outstanding academic record, law firms refused to hire her, and a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would not employ her as his clerk solely because of her sex.

Despite these obstacles, she became one of the nation's foremost legal scholars and a highly effective advocate for the equality of the sexes. She argued a series of historic cases before the Supreme Court, establishing the equal citizenship rights of men and women. In 1993, she herself was appointed to the nation's highest court, where she served for 27 years, ruling on the issues of constitutional law that define the rights of all Americans.

(Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was interviewed twice by the American Academy of Achievement at the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. - on August 17, 2010 and July 14, 2016. The following transcript draws on both video interviews.) Justice Ginsburg, when did you decide to become a lawyer?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Oh, it was sometime I guess around the end of my second year - maybe the beginning of my third year - at Cornell.

It was a tax case. Marty came into the bedroom where I worked and said, "Ruth, I think you should read this decision." And my response was, "Marty, you know that I don't read tax cases." He said, "Read this one." I did. It was the story of a man who was never married. He took care of his then-93-year-old mother. And he took what the Internal Revenue Code allowed as a babysitter's deduction, which you could take for the care of an elderly infirm relative of any age. So he took this $600 deduction, and he was audited by the IRS, and they said you can't take that deduction. He said, "Oh, I've been told that there's an elder care just like there's a baby care." The people who qualified for the deduction were any woman or a widowed or divorced man. Charles E. Moritz was a never-married man. He took his case to the tax court pro se. He represented himself and he filed a brief, which was a model. No lawyer would have done such a thing, but it was just right. He said, "If I had been a dutiful daughter, I would get this deduction. I'm a dutiful son. This makes no sense." And the tax court judge in his opinion said, "I glean that the taxpayer is making a Constitutional argument," but the next words were to the effect, "Everyone knows that the Internal Revenue Code is immune from Constitutional attack." So as soon as I read that decision, I said, "Marty, let's take it." And that's how Charles E. Moritz became our client.

I call the Moritz brief the grandparent brief. First, I understood the likely reception to my argument that it's gender-based discrimination, what was then called sex-based discrimination: "What are you talking about? Women have the best of all possible worlds. Think of jury duty. Yes, we don't put them on the jury rolls, but if they want to serve, they can go to the clerk's office and sign up and we will add them. So they don't have to serve. Women are on a pedestal. They are sheltered. They are protected. And men have to go out into the large cold world and earn a living." The laws, the statutes, both state and federal, reflected that difference. A good name for it is the separate spheres mentality.

Do you remember getting the call telling you that President Clinton wanted to interview you for a Supreme Court vacancy? There was a fashion issue...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Oh, because I had just come in from - I was in Vermont for a wedding. And the White House Counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, said, "Come meet the President. Don't worry if you're in your travel clothes. He will be coming in off the golf course." So when I came to the White House, and the president walked in, he was not in his golf clothes, he was in his Sunday best. He had just come back from church. So I was kind of embarrassed by the way I looked.
It didn't seem to harm anything.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: But it worked out just fine. Yes.

After Sandra Day O'Connor retired from the Court, you were the only woman for several years. You dissented more frequently. Finally there was the day that the Court heard the case of Savanna Redding. In your very understated way, you blew a gasket. What was it about that case that made you so mad?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Savanna Redding was a 13-year-old girl. She was in the eighth grade, and she was suspected of having given pills to a classmate. The pills turned out to be Advil, but Savanna was taken to the girl's bathroom and strip-searched. And then when the strip search was over and they found no pills, she was made to sit in a chair outside the principal's office for two hours until they called her mother and said, "Pick her up." Her mother was infuriated. And she sued the school district for humiliating her daughter that way. And the question was, "Had the school district violated her civil rights?" The Court answered yes to that question. But the next question is, "Should there be damages, because the principal should have known that this behavior was unlawful?" and the Court said no damages. The principal is cloaked with immunity because we have never had a case like this before so he didn't know. He didn't know that what was done was unlawful. And that's when I said, "Anyone who reads the Fourth Amendment protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, humiliating that 13-year-old girl in that way was the most unreasonable search." There were jokes about the boys in the locker room, and the boys unclothed in front of each other, and nobody thought anything of it. And I think I said from the bench that 13 is a vulnerable age for a girl, and a 13-year-old girl is not like a 13-year-old boy. This is overwhelming humiliation for her. And I think when I said something to that effect, then the jokes stopped. There were no more jokes about the boys in the locker room. I suppose my colleagues thought of their daughters, thought of their wives, and realized then that the point I was making was well-taken.

I want to talk to you for a moment about your husband, Marty. How long were you married?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We were married for 56 years when he died. Yes.
He was a master chef, a master tax lawyer and law professor, and your biggest booster. You've said that, from the very beginning, he was not just in your corner - it was something more than that.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Marty was always my biggest booster. He was a remarkable man. He was so sure of his own ability that he never regarded me as any kind of threat. On the contrary, I suppose he thought, "Well, if I decided I want to spend my life with her, she must be pretty good!" So he was at every stage of my life my strongest supporter.
The day after he died in 2010, you were on the bench. It was close to the end of the term and you were announcing an important decision that you'd written. You didn't have to be there. Somebody could have announced the decision for you.
You've spent your life in the law. Were there lawyers in your family?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: There were no lawyers in my family. My father came to the United States from Russia when he was 13, and apart from night school to learn English, he had no formal schooling. My mother was the sixth child to be born in her large family, and the first one born in the U.S.A. She was born four months after her parents arrived.
From where?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: From Austria. And she was a very good student; she graduated high school at age 15 and then went immediately to work so that she could help support the eldest son, who was going to Cornell University. In those families, the eldest son was the one on whom the most attention was lavished, and no one thought about sending girls to higher education.
Did she work while you were growing up?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: No, because, I think my mother would have thrived had she worked. But when she was married, it was considered a disgrace to a man that his wife worked. It would mean that he was unable to support her. So she stopped working when she married, but she was always helpful to my father in his work. In fact, when she died - she died when I was 17, just before I was to graduate from high school - when she died his business went downhill, because she was a very important part of keeping it afloat.
What was his business?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was a manufacturer of furs.
What kind of student were you? You went to public schools, we understand.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I went to P.S. 238 in Brooklyn and to James Madison High School in Brooklyn. I was a good student, in some part to please my mother. I wanted to bring home a report card that she would find satisfactory.
What was your mother like?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My mother was a voracious reader. And one gift that she gave me was loving to read. My favorite memory was sitting on her lap, she would read books to me. We had a daily - a weekly excursion to the public library. And she would leave me in the library in the children's section, have her hair done, and then pick me up when I had my three or four books for the week.
You spoke about her on the day you were nominated to the Court in the Rose Garden. What do you think she would make of you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think she would be surprised - and no end pleased. My mother was born in an era when it was a disgrace for a married woman to work, if her husband could support her. And so my mother ,who started working when she was 15 - she graduated high school at 15 - went immediately to work, so she could help the family while the eldest son went off to Cornell. He was the only one in the family that had a college education. So then she did not work once she married. I think she wished that she had been able to continue.
Do you remember enjoying particular books when you were growing up?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well written, they weren't, but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn't have to take a back seat or be wallflowers. So the Nancy Drew series was important to me. When I was even younger, I loved mythology. I loved Greek mythology and Norse mythology.
So then you go off to Cornell. What was that like?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Cornell in the early '50s was considered a great school for girls because there were four men to every woman. It was a strict quota system. That meant the women were ever so much smarter than the boys. But it wasn't the thing to do to show how smart you were. It was much better that you gave the impression that you weren't working at all, that you were a party girl. So I did my studying in various bathrooms on the campus. Then when I went back to the dormitory, I didn't have homework to do.
You had some wonderful professors, and you've talked about your literature professor in particular, who is a pretty famous guy.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Nabokov. Yes.
Vladimir Nabokov?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. Vladimir, the author of Lolita and many other things. He was a man who was in love with the sound of words, and he would read aloud from the books that were assigned, and showed us how a writer could paint pictures with words and how important having the right word in the right place would be. He gave an example of why he liked writing in the English language. I'm not sure that his first language was Russian. It may have been French. But the example that he gave was if you're speaking French and you want to refer to a white horse so you say cheval blanc, first you see the horse and "horse" stimulates "brown" in your mind. Then you have to readjust it with "white." But in English, "white" comes before "horse," so you see the white horse immediately. That was the kind of thing that was important to Nabokov. He was a marvelous teacher, wonderfully amusing.
At Cornell, you met Marty Ginsburg. At first you were just friends, but you realized pretty soon that he was different than the other boys.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. I many times said that Marty Ginsburg was the first boy I met who cared that I had a brain.
And he liked that you had a brain.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was extraordinary in that respect. Yes.
When you married Marty, you got a second mother, his mother. She gave you some important advice that you say has served you well through life.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: My mother-in-law's advice, which she gave me on the day of our wedding - we were married in Marty's home, and his mother took me into the bedroom, her bedroom and said, "Dear, I'd like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage." "Yes. What is the secret?" "It helps sometimes to be a little deaf." And I found that advice - it stood me in very good stead not only in a wonderful marriage that lasted well over half a century, but in every workplace I've served, dealing with my faculty colleagues when I was a law teacher, and even now with my colleagues on the Supreme Court. When an unkind word is said, a thoughtless word, best to tune out.
The two of you ended up at Harvard Law School. You were one of nine women in your first year at Harvard. And you weren't exactly greeted with open arms, were you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: The nine of us were greeted by the dean, Dean Erwin, at a dinner he held in his home. He invited the nine women, and each of us had a faculty escort. My escort was Herbert Wexler, later my colleague at Columbia. He was a man who looked more like God than anyone I'd ever seen. I was totally taken with him but intimidated because he was so brilliant. Anyway, we had a meal. It was not a memorable meal. And there was no wine because the dean was a teetotaler. And then he had the chairs in his living room arranged in a semicircle and asked each of us in turn to say what we were doing at the Harvard Law School occupying a seat that could be held by a man. And most of us were embarrassed by the question, but years later when the dean became a friend, I realized what he was trying to do. The dean was not known for his sense of humor. Harvard didn't admit women until 1950-'51, was the first year the law school admitted women. There were still doubting Thomases on the faculty. And the dean wanted to be armed with stories from the women themselves about what they would do with a law degree. So that's why he asked the question. Of course, the women in my class didn't exactly comprehend that at the time, but one of them gave him a perfect answer. Mine was far from perfect. But this was Flora Schnall. She had a distinguished career as a lawyer. She said, "Dean Griswold, there are nine of us. Well, really Ruth Ginsburg doesn't count for this purpose. So there are eight, and there are over 500 of them. What better place to find a man?" And the dean, I think, was horrified by that answer, but she was the only one who treated it in the way it should have been treated.

For the most part, my professors treated the women in the class fairly. There was no such thing as "Ladies' Day" in any of my classes. "Ladies' Day" was notorious in law schools. It was the day when only women were called on and the rest of the year they were ignored. I did not have that experience, but I did have this experience: The nine of us were divided into four sections, so that meant most of us were in a room with just one other woman. If we were called on, we worried that if we failed, if we didn't give the right answer, we would be failing not just for ourselves, but for all women. It is somewhat similar to people saying, when a car takes a wrong turn, "What would you expect? It's a woman driver." So we were on our toes. We were always well prepared. Years later, when women were beginning to come to law school in numbers in the 1970s, I was then teaching at Columbia, and one of my colleagues said that he really longed for the good old days when there were few women in the class, because he said if things were going slowly and you needed a crisp right answer, you called on the woman. She was always prepared. She would give you the right answer and then the class could move along. "But nowadays," he said, "there's no difference. The women are as unprepared as the men."
At Harvard you and Marty had a three-year-old daughter.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Jane was 14 months when I started.
So you have a daughter. You were eventually on law review. You're juggling schedules, and he's diagnosed with testicular cancer, which at the time was a very serious thing. We have much better ways of treating that now.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Daily radiation that seemed to go on forever. The doctor said four weeks, and then four weeks were over, and there was a fifth week and a sixth week. It was the only thing they had. It was massive radiation. It wasn't pinpointed the way it is today.
How did you get through this time? He was very sick. You were taking care of him. You were typing his papers. You were getting notes from his classes. You were taking care of Jane. How did the two of you get through this period?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We never thought about the possibility or never talked about the possibility that he might not survive. We were concentrating on getting him through the third year. And by the way, Marty went to classes for only two weeks, the last two weeks of the semester. In that semester he got the highest grades that he ever got in law school because he had the best tutors. And Harvard was known as a competitive place. My experience was the opposite. His classmates, my classmates rallied around the two of us and prepared individual tutorials to help prepare him for the exams. How did I get through it? Well, I was able to get by with very little sleep. Because of the radiation, Marty couldn't ingest anything until midnight. And so between midnight and two he had dinner, my bad hamburger usually. And then he would dictate to me his senior paper, and then he'd go back to sleep. And it was about 2:00 when I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to read to be prepared for classes the next day.
Was this the beginning of the schedule you keep now, when you work all night and don't get up until noon unless you're on the bench?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, except in those days I was much younger so I could get up early in the morning in time to make my first class, which sometimes was 8:00.
A famous Justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, was asked to consider hiring you as one of his law clerks. You had amazing qualifications, having been on the law reviews of both Columbia and Harvard. You were recommended by a Harvard professor. And you tied for first place in your graduating class at Columbia. What was Justice Frankfurter's reaction?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Justice Frankfurter, like his colleagues, was just not prepared to hire a woman. Now these were pre-Title VII days, so there was nothing unlawful about discriminating against women. And gentlemen of a certain age at that time felt that they would be discomfited by a woman in chambers, that they might have to watch what they say, they might have to censor their speech. It was surprising that Frankfurter had that typical, in those days, reaction, because he was the first justice to hire an African American as a law clerk some years before. But as I said, like many other federal judges of the time, he just wasn't prepared to hire a woman.
The famous Judge Learned Hand told you why he wouldn't hire you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Judge Learned Hand was a brilliant jurist, and I wanted to clerk for him more than anything, even more than for a Supreme Court Justice. And my judge, Judge Palmieri, he lived around the corner from Judge Hand and would drive Judge Hand into work and back. And whenever I was finished early enough, I would join them on that ride. I'd sit in the back of the car. And this great man would say anything that came into his head. He sang songs at the top of his lungs. He used words that I never heard. And I asked him, "Judge Hand, I don't seem to inhibit your speech when you're in the car. Why won't you consider me as a law clerk?" And he said, "Young lady, I am not looking at you." For a man of that time, of that age, you didn't use bad language in front of a lady.

When I applied for law firm jobs, Columbia had an excellent placement office, but sign-up sheets would go up and many would say "men only." I had, as I have sometimes explained, three strikes that put me out when it came to employment as a lawyer. One is I am Jewish and the law firms were just beginning to stop discriminating on the basis of religion. That affected Catholics as well as Jews. They were opening up to all people without regard to religion. And some, a precious few, were ready to try a woman, but none were willing to take a chance on a mother, and my daughter was four years old when I graduated from law school. So of course I was disappointed, but it wasn't unexpected.
You've said that Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex made a great impression on you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex the first time I was in Sweden. And I was observing a society that was more advanced than we were in recognizing women's talent and capacities. At that time, 1962, women were less than three percent of the law students in the United States. They were already 20 percent in Sweden. There was a woman writing a column in the Stockholm daily paper to this effect: why should the woman have two jobs and the man only one? In Sweden it was already not only accepted but expected that there would be two-earner families. Inflation was high, and if you wanted to do well by your children, you needed two incomes. But she was expected to have dinner on the table at seven, buy the children's new shoes, take them for the medical checkups and the rest. And this columnist, whose name was Eva Moberg, her question was, "Shouldn't he do more than take out the garbage?" And there were many, many people talking about that. So I was listening to these conversations at the same time as I was reading The Second Sex, which is an eye opener.
Why is it an eye opener?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Because of the irrational differences. She shows the differences between the way women are treated, the way men are treated, and it doesn't inevitably have to be that way. There were some societies that she commented on where the woman is the queen bee.
So you ended up eventually as a professor at Rutgers Law School, where you actually hid your own pregnancy.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That was a wonderful thing that happened because Marty was told after all that radiation that it would be impossible for us to have a second child. So that was very good news. But there was no amniocentesis at the time, and we didn't know what James would turn out to be. But in any event, at that time it was my second year at Rutgers. I had a year-to-year contract. And I was pretty sure that if I told them I was pregnant, I wouldn't get a contract for the next year. So I wore my mother-in-law's clothes. It was just right. She was one size larger. And I got through the spring semester. When I had the new contract in hand, I told my colleagues when I came back in the fall, there would be one more in our family. So they stopped thinking that I was gaining a lot of weight.
You have said that, in a sense, you yourself were a product of affirmative action in being hired by Columbia in the early 1960s. Were they looking to diversify their faculty?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. The Women's Movement came alive in the United States in the late '60s, and the government in those days was heavily into affirmative action. People don't remember that affirmative action became a major item during Nixon's administration, and it started in the construction trades, which were highly exclusionary. There was a good deal of nepotism, so you got a starting job as an apprentice if your father or your uncle was a member of the union.

And it was Nixon's Secretary of Labor who thought that the best way to break that exclusion was to have people who have contracts with government - and many people do - pledge to do two things. One was to set goals and timetables, the assumption was, now let's assume there would be no discrimination, about how many members of a minority group might be expected. So you set that number as the goal and a timetable for when you would achieve it. And this was not something that was absolute. If there was a good reason why you couldn't comply, so be it.

But it was necessary for people who held government contracts at least to make an effort. And most colleges and universities had government money of some sort. There was a very active office for civil rights in the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare. And the head of that office was a man named Stan Pottinger. He was visiting colleges and universities all over America to encourage them to fulfill their affirmative action obligations, and also to remind them that if they didn't, there was a possibility that their contracts might be suspended or even terminated. So in the year 1972 Columbia named two people to the faculty. One was an African American man and one was a woman, the first ever hired in a tenured post.
And that was you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes.
How is it, going back to your alma mater, going back to Columbia?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I go to Columbia regularly. I have a very close tie to Columbia because my daughter is on the Columbia Law School faculty, and a former law clerk is the dean. David Schizer is the Dean of the Columbia Law School. His mother was a classmate of mine at Columbia. So I have strong connections to the Columbia Law School.
And he was a law clerk of yours?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. David Schizer, who is now the Dean of Columbia Law School. My second year on the Supreme Court - so it would have been 1994 to '95 - he was my very excellent law clerk.
When you became the first tenured woman on the faculty of Columbia Law School, did you feel some resentment from fellow faculty members, or by then was it more accepted?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I had a great deal of support from my faculty colleagues. None of them were resentful. Most of them were so secure about themselves and the excellence of the Columbia faculty, their idea was that if Columbia decided to engage me to be a tenured professor, then I must be really good. And even if I were doing things that they didn't, that they would disagree with, they were backing me up. One example: I was named the law school's representative on the university senate. Women who were teaching in the university had a suspicion that they were not getting equal pay, so the start to finding out if that suspicion was right was finding out just what salaries the university was paying. And the administration's answer was that's secret information, all kinds of jealousies would result if we published them. And of course, you couldn't find out if Columbia was meeting its equal pay obligations without that information, which we eventually got, and the suspicions proved right.
That you were paid less than your male colleagues.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I wasn't, because coming on in 1972 they made certain that I would be treated as well as my male peers. But women who had worked at the university for years, who came on in the days when it was accepted to pay women less.
And these were faculty members?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Faculty or top administrators. The hardest thing for my colleagues to accept was when we - and by we, I mean the ACLU women's rights project, which I helped to found - challenged the TIAA CREF program, and the retirement program used by most colleges and universities, because they rigidly separated the policy beneficiaries by sex. So they used mortality tables for men, for women. And the women would get less when they retired than a man with equivalent salary and time in service. The reason was that on average it's fair, because women on average live longer than men. And my view was, "Yes, that's certainly true on average, but there are some men who live long and some women who die early." And the whole notion is that you don't lump together women simply because they are women, and that TIAA CREF should merge their mortality tables. Well, the immediate response was, "Horrors! We just couldn't do that! Then all the men would desert the plan and get private insurance." Well, TIAA CREF was such a good deal that when they did finally merge the tables, nobody left. But that was the most worrisome thing to my faculty colleagues. Even so, they supported a class action that was brought with 100 named plaintiffs on behalf of women teachers and administrators at Columbia, charging that maintaining separate mortality tables essentially denied women equal pay, and was in violation of our foremost anti-discrimination law: Title VII.
Justice Ginsburg, may we ask what you are most proud of having accomplished so far in your career?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I was fortunate to be born at the right time and to be in the right place when the Women's Movement came alive. So many things were wrong with the way life was ordered in the '70s. In many states, women didn't serve on juries, to take just one example, and there were so many jobs that were off limits to women. People began to realize there was something wrong about that, and women should be free to aspire and achieve just as men are. So I had legal education, and I could use that education to help move this movement for change, for allowing women to realize their full potential, help move that along. So it was that ten years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about - I don't say women's rights - I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women. I was tremendously fortunate to be able to participate in that movement for change.
You eventually went to Columbia, where you formed the ACLU Women's Project, and you brought a whole series of cases. You often liked to have male clients. Why was that?
Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Like Charles E. Moritz, like Stephen Wiesenfeld. Stephen Wiesenfeld's case was even more compelling than Charles E. Moritz. Stephen Wiesenfeld's wife died in childbirth. She had been a school teacher. She earned slightly more than he did. When she died, Stephen went to the Social Security office. He thought that if he worked part-time up to the ceiling that Social Security allowed you to earn, the Social Security benefits plus what he could earn on top of that, he could just about make it and take care of his child and not go to work full-time until the child was in school a full day. So he went to the Social Security office and asked for what he was told were child-in-care benefits. And he was told, "We're very sorry, Mr. Wiesenfeld. Those are mother's benefits. They're not available to fathers." So he was the person who immediately felt the effect of the law. But where did that discrimination begin? It began with the woman as wage earner. Women paid the same Social Security tax that men paid, but it didn't net for their family the same protection. Same tax but unequal protection. So we could say Stephen Wiesenfeld is feeling the effect of this discrimination, but it began with his wife, the wage earner, who was not treated as a full wage earner. She was a woman wage earner, and that meant she was secondary, she was earning pin money, no Social Security benefits for her family when she dies.

So the woman was discriminated against as wage earner, the male as parent, and that conformed to what was the basic separation that the man was the breadwinner, the woman was responsible for care of the home and children. So again, we never challenged how life was for most people. We said stereotypes, while there are stereotypes that are true in general, but there were many people who don't fit the mold. And the whole object in the 1970s - through first public education - then attempt to change the laws by going to the state legislatures and Congress, and finally the courts were there as a last resort.

The idea I think was best expressed in a song that Ms. magazine published, and I think it was Marlo Thomas who was involved. The song is Free to be You and Me, and that was the idea. That male or female, you should be free to follow your star, to develop your talent, and you shouldn't be held back by artificial barriers.
You said that some laws that would seem, on the surface, to help women, in a way discriminate, because it implies that women need more help than men.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That women need to be protected. That was true. Our legislation said women couldn't work more than eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. And that might have been fine in the days of sweatshops when some employers required women to work six days a week, 12 hours a day. But over the years, especially with unions protecting workers, the workday shrunk from 12 hours to ten hours to eight. And then if an employer wanted more hours, the employer would have to pay time-and-a-half or double time for those additional hours. So the hours laws that started out to protect women from sweatshop conditions ended up protecting men's jobs from women's competition. If an employer has two choices, a woman who cannot be engaged to work overtime and a man who is willing to do that, he would pick the man. So the protections over time came to be not protections, but barriers for women.

To take another simple example, women couldn't be engaged to work at night. No night work. Well, if a woman is a waitress, the most lucrative tips - at banquets and such - come in the evening, not at lunchtime. So women came to realize that these old-style protections were not genuine protections for women, but they helped to keep things the way they were where there was this sharp divide between what women do and what men do, and the notion was to break down those stereotypes. So if a man wants to go to a nursing school, then that's okay, that's fine. And if a woman wants to be an engineer, a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, that's fine too. And now it's not at all extraordinary for a woman to be any of those things.
You argued six cases before the Supreme Court and you won five of them. You wrote briefs in dozens more. What were you trying to achieve in the Oklahoma case Craig v. Boren?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The "near-beer" case, Craig against Boren. Well, when we started out, there were two levels of review of cases that relied on the equal protection principle. One level was the highest. It was labeled strict scrutiny. It was reserved for discrimination on the basis of race. Everyone knew that racial discrimination was odious, should not be permitted. So a racial classification that adversely affected the minority race got this high level of review, was looked at very suspiciously. Everything else, the test was "rational basis," which some people say, "Rational basis, all you have to do to get a law accepted by the Supreme Court is pass the lunatic test. If it isn't lunatic, then it's okay. Then Congress has the authority to do that."

We needed to ratchet up that level. And incidentally, I looked at all of the Supreme Court cases involving equal protection and was able to get out some phrases here and there that suggested a higher level of review, something more than the lunatic test. So our object was to ratchet up the review standard for gender-based discrimination. It was interesting that in the turning point case, Reed v. Reed, the Court didn't even mention that it was doing something new, that the law in question, yes, it would have passed the rational basis test, but they held it was no good. This was a law of the State of Idaho that said as between persons equally entitled to administer a decedent's estate, males must be preferred to females. Simple as that. And the rival contenders in that case were Sally Reed and Cecil Reed. They had a teenage son. They were divorced. When the boy was what the law calls "of tender years," when he was young, the mother had custody. When the boy reached his teens, the father said, "Now he needs to be prepared for a man's world so I should be the custodian." Sally didn't like that idea at all, but she objected in vain. Sadly she turned out to be right. The boy, living with his father, became terribly depressed and one day took out one of his father's many guns and committed suicide. So Sally wanted to be appointed administrator to his estate. She couldn't. Why? Males must be preferred to females. Why would we have such a law? Because in the ancient days in the 19 th century, before the Married Women's Property Acts were passed, women - if they married - couldn't sue and be sued, they couldn't make contracts in their own name, they couldn't hold property in their own name. So if you had a choice between two people to be the administrator of the decedent's estate, of course you'd pick the competent person, one who can make contracts, the one who can hold property, the one who can sue and be sued. That's why there were such laws on the books.
When you were litigating all these cases, running the ACLU project, arguing cases in the Supreme Court, your son was getting in trouble all the time at school.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My son was a lively child. I called him lively. His teachers called him hyperactive. And I would get calls at least once a month to please come down to the school to meet with the room teacher or the school psychologist or the principal to hear about my son's latest escapade. And one day I was at my office in Columbia, very tired because I had stayed up all night writing a brief. And I got the call. This time I said, "This child has two parents. Please alternate calls. And this time it's his father's turn." So Marty went down to the school. He left his law office, met with three stone faces who disclosed my son's latest offense. What did he do? He stole the elevator. It was a hand-held elevator that the elevator operator - in those days people were still smoking - the operator went out to have a cigarette, and one of my son's classmates dared him to take a group of kindergarteners up to the top floor in the elevator, which he did. So Marty's response on being told that your son stole the elevator was, "How far could he take it?" So I don't know whether it was Marty's wonderful sense of humor or the reluctance of the school to call a father away from his work, but then we got the calls barely once a semester, although there was no quick change in James's behavior. People were much more reluctant to take a man away from his work than a woman.
You give a great deal of credit for the abortion decision and the affirmative action decision this term, and a couple of decisions last term, to one of the more conservative members of the court, Justice Kennedy. The abortion decision you said was particularly difficult for him.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was very difficult for him, but I think he sensed that what was going on with those restrictions, they were severe restrictions that it was a sham to say they protected women's health. What they did was make access to abortion almost impossible for many poor women - or access to a safe abortion - thus driving them to back-alley abortionists the way it was in the not-so-good old days. So I thought that the Court recognizing that that kind of legislation simply would not pass constitutional review was very important. I think both the affirmative action decision and the whole women's health case, the access to abortion, they kind of quieted the turmoil that was going on. How was the Court going to rule? This way or that way? I think, for the nonce, we will not have any major cases in either field because the Court spoke. I think both decisions were excellent, very well-reasoned, and will be accepted.
When you joined Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, you were the second woman. She was the first. And even though she was a Reagan appointee and you were a Clinton appointee, you had a bond right away.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: She was almost like a big sister to me. Sandra Day O'Connor is a truly great woman. When I came onboard she told me just what I needed to know to be able to manage those first weeks. She didn't douse me with a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn't possibly retain. At so many stages of my life she gave me good counsel. When I had colorectal cancer, Sandra had had breast cancer. She had massive surgery. She was in court hearing argument nine days after her surgery. So her advice to me was, "Ruth, you're having chemotherapy. Schedule it for Friday so then by Monday you'll be over it. You'll be over the bad effects." That's how she was. Anything that came her way, she would deal with it. She would just do it.
Justice O'Connor did a very generous thing for you, relatively early in your tenure, when the Court heard the VMI case testing whether the Virginia Military Institute could exclude women.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Virginia Military Institute is a fine school. It offers an incredible opportunity, but it limited that opportunity to men. There were women who were ready, willing, and able to go through that arduous training. What they wanted more than anything else was the kind of old-boy network. The VMI alums are very loyal. They try to help the graduates on their way. And I think only about 15 percent of VMI graduates end up with military careers. The rest are in business and commerce. So it was an important opportunity that was not open to women, and there was nothing comparable for them. I wanted to write the decision. And by the way, the name of the case is revealing. It was "United States against Virginia." It was the United States Government that was suing the state of Virginia, saying, "State of Virginia, you can't offer an educational opportunity to one sex only." I was rather low on the totem pole. In fact, I did get the assignment because Justice O'Connor said Ruth should write this case. I think she had considerable seniority then, and so she would have been the logical person to get the assignment, but she said I should write it.
Another one of your friends, not just on the Supreme Court but on the Court of Appeals before that, was Justice Scalia. He was the sole dissenter in that case, but you've said that he did you a favor in that case.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He came into my chambers with what he said was the penultimate draft of his dissent in the VMI case. He said he wasn't quite ready to circulate it to the Court. It needed more polishing. But the term was getting on toward the end and he wanted to give me as much time as he possibly could to answer his dissent. I was about to go off to my circuit judicial conference. I took the opinion draft with me. I started reading it on the plane to Albany, and it was - even for Scalia - it was a real zinger. It was. So I spent the whole weekend thinking about how I would - in a restrained and moderate way - answer to these comments. I mean he took me to task for everything. I had a footnote in which I referred to "the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia." He said, "We must excuse this Justice who is probably more familiar with schools in New York where they may have a campus here and a campus there. There is no Charlottesville campus. There is only the University of Virginia. Period." The greatest thing for me was to have a Scalia dissent. He would point out all the soft spots, and that would give me an opportunity to improve the opinion to make it more persuasive than it was before I got this stimulating dissent.
After the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized gay marriage, you attended a social occasion along with Justice Scalia and ended up singing together, didn't you?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was the day of the same-sex marriage case. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the Court. I joined him. Justice Scalia dissented vigorously. That's an understatement. And yet we were all together that evening at this wonderful dinner that Catherine and Wayne Reynolds had. The head of NIH took out his guitar. Renee Fleming began to sing with him. And everybody joined in. So there was Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia, and I was there too, all singing rather raucously, "The times, they are a-changing."
There was an opera written about you and Scalia and your conservative liberal friendship. You had a couple of favorite lines from one of the arias in the opera.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well first, in the Court everything goes by seniority, so the opera is Scalia/Ginsburg. Even though I was three years older than Justice Scalia, he was appointed several years before I was, so he comes first in the ranking. It opens with Scalia's rage aria. And for those who know music, it's straight out of Handel, real Handelian. And the words are: "The Justices are blind. How can they possibly spout this? The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this." And then my answering aria is: "Dear Justice Scalia, you are searching in vain for bright-line solutions to cases that have no easy answer, but the great thing about our Constitution is like our society, it can evolve." And then the opera switches into a jazz mode, and the singer goes on, "Let it grow, let it grow!"
What does the American Dream mean to you, Justice Ginsburg?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: How can I describe the American Dream? Maybe it's captured by the first ride I took on a New York subway, after returning from several months in Sweden, where everybody looked the same, and here I was on the subway, and the amazing diversity of the people of the United States. You know the motto is E pluribus unum - "Of many, one" - and that's the idea that, more than just tolerating, we can appreciate our differences and yet pull together for the long haul. So that is my idea of the American Dream, sometimes referred to as "the melting pot." That's not quite right, because we keep our individual identities, but we are all Americans, and proud to live in the land of the free.
This is a historic moment for the Supreme Court, an unprecedented three Supreme Court justices are women, something Justice Frankfurter would have been very surprised by. Talk about how that might affect the future.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It's obvious now that women are really here and we're here to stay, just as men are. We are not one or two at a time curiosities. So I think this is an exhilarating change. When I was a new justice on this court for the twelve years that I sat together with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, invariably one lawyer or another would call me Justice O'Connor. They had become accustomed to a woman on the court and Justice O'Connor was the woman, so if they heard a woman's voice - well, that must be the lady justice, even though we don't look alike, we don't sound alike. But last year no one called Justice Sotomayor Justice Ginsburg or me Justice Sotomayor, and I am certain that lawyers will perceive the difference among the three of us and we will each have our individual identities. We're not quite where the Supreme Court of Canada is. The Supreme Court of Canada also has nine justices: four are women, including their chief justice. I think we will not be too far behind.
What do you think is the next frontier in women's rights or civil rights? Where do we still need to go?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The hardest barrier to surmount for most women, I think it's no longer at the entry level of any job, no longer access to any educational facility. I think, for example, that Justice Kagan did not encounter any discrimination in admissions to college, law school, getting a job, getting a clerkship. But what is very hard for most women is what happens when children are born. Will men become equal parents, sharing the joys as well as the burdens of bringing up the next generation? But that's my dream for the world, for every child to have two loving parents who share in raising the child. And now, I think I have to go back to work.
Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Academy of Achievement

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When Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her career as an attorney, America's courtrooms and law firms were virtually all-male preserves. Female attorneys were a rarity, female judges were almost unheard of, and in many states women were routinely dismissed from jury duty.

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Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law
Special Adviser for Public Service, Harvard Law School

Almost a decade ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg received an honorary degree from Harvard, joining a star-studded list of other luminaries being similarly honored that day. As each honorand was called up to receive a degree from then-President Drew Faust, the crowd responded with warm appreciation. Plácido Domingo, the famed opera singer; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia and the first woman to lead an African country; Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web; Dudley Herschbach, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry - each received enthusiastic applause and even pockets of standing cheers. But when Ruth Bader Ginsburg's name was called, the entire Tercentenary Theatre erupted into a massive, thunderous standing ovation. And when Ginsburg descended from the stage at the end of the ceremonies, people scrambled to the aisle to try to snap photos or to touch the sleeve of her robe as she passed.

Many famous and accomplished people have been honored at Harvard's graduations, including a number of Supreme Court justices. But this was different. Ginsburg would not be dubbed "Notorious RBG" for another two years, but she was already an icon. Why? Not merely for her important work on the nation's highest court, but also for her trailblazing work in an era when female attorneys and legal rights for women were both depressingly few and far between. The story of Ginsburg's tremendous successes as a young civil rights attorney who litigated the key cases establishing women's constitutional right to equal treatment has been well-told in the documentary "RBG" and the biopic "On the Basis of Sex." But our familiarity with that story does not make it any less amazing or improbable. The world will never be the same.

300th Anniversary University Professor,
Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Member of the Faculty of Education

Very few individuals in history come close to the extraordinary and significant role played by Justice Ginsburg in the pursuit of justice before she joined the bench. She would be a landmark figure just by being the first woman to earn a tenured faculty post at Columbia Law School. And she made history as director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court - brilliantly crafting successful challenges to the system of legally enforced gender roles that limited opportunities for both women and men. With vision and brilliance, she earned a place in the history books and on the honor roll of civil rights heroes.

Then, as judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, she demonstrated the highest level of legal craft in crucial decisions. And as associate justice of the Supreme Court, she has produced a body of superbly crafted opinions, building on precedent while always demonstrating that law is meant to - and with conscientious work can - serve justice for real people.

When she was a student at Harvard Law School, she faced a class of over 500 men and only seven other women. She juggled her roles as a wife and mother with her work as a law student and faced a dean who chided female students for taking the places of qualified males. She excelled. She joined the Harvard Law Review. When her husband, fellow law student Martin Ginsburg, had to deal with cancer, she took notes for him and helped him recover. And when the Harvard dean refused her request to earn her degree while moving to New York with her family and completing her final year of schooling at Columbia Law School, she transferred there and promptly rose to the top of the class.

She gently but rightly resisted the requests of later Harvard Law School deans to accept a tardy degree from Harvard Law School. Finally, in 2011, she received a Harvard degree - an honorary doctorate, the University's highest academic honor. In celebration, an opera singer - and fellow honoree - sang for her and the assembled crowd.

I am one of countless people she directly encouraged and deeply inspired to use reason and argument in service of justice and humanity. Justice Ginsburg also showed that it is possible to build deep and meaningful friendships with people despite severe disagreements. At this time of deep social and political divisions, there is much to learn from her life and her commitments. Above all, she changed the lives of millions as a lawyer and as a jurist by dismantling barriers to employment, education, and roles in families and society based solely on gender - and showed how law can, with persistence and vision, be a tool to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Director, International Human Rights Clinic

Fearless. Brilliant. Resilient. As both an advocate and a jurist, Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us how to use the law, creatively and strategically, to promote justice. Her legacy, of course, is as a champion for the equality of all people and a hero in the struggle for women's rights.

Her example has always been an inspiration. As law students, my peers and I wanted to be her, or at least be like her. She was a visionary litigator, a tenacious questioner at oral argument, and a witty storyteller. She personified determination and demonstrated how to fight with grace and an apparently tireless energy. Her intellect, strength, and confidence helped us believe in ourselves, our voices, and our contributions.

But more broadly, her legacy implores us to understand that the role of the Supreme Court - and of the legal system itself - is not to engage in a series of debates about abstract or purely intellectual legal propositions. The law is about people, their lives, and their aspirations. Attorneys who use the law to promote social justice must, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, be mindful of the fundamentally human aspect of our work.

Justice Ginsburg always recognized those who had paved the way for her, even as she broke new ground for us. Although her accomplishments are singular, her legacy teaches us that upholding justice requires a collective effort. Her life's work is a reminder of the law's capacity to transform systems and cultures, and to shift power. So, as we mourn this crushing loss, we must continue her fight for equal rights and sustain her commitment to the rule of law.
Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Justice Ginsburg personified the best of what it meant to be a judge. She brought a deep intellectual and personal integrity to everything she did. Her powerful and unyielding commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice under law place her among the great Justices in the annals of the court. She was also one of the most impactful lawyers of the 20th century, whose historic work advocating against gender discrimination and for equal rights for all opened doors for countless people and transformed our society. She was an inspiring and courageous human being. We have lost a giant.
Laurence H. Tribe Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
Justice Ginsburg's impact on the law is enormous. The gender equality cases she litigated and won, and the gender equality cases she helped decide in the Supreme Court, including VMI, will continue to shape the law for generations to come. Her commitment to "equal justice under law" was not limited to issues of women's equality. The opinions she wrote in cases involving efforts to overcome America's history of racial injustice (for example, in affirmative action in public universities or through the Voting Rights Act), and the opinions she joined in cases extending equality norms to LGBTQ persons, bespoke the breadth and depth of her commitment.

Justice Ginsburg loved the law; she believed in the importance of legal procedures; she had a prodigious memory and broad knowledge, which she continued to refresh through reading and research; and she carefully scrutinized laws that she thought were based on unsupported suppositions or stereotypes. She applied her extraordinary analytical mind not only to large, general issues, but also to protect individuals from unfair application of procedural rules.

Her openness about her own life has allowed others to envision paths that combine rewarding work with loving family life and friendships. As she showed, tradition need not determine family roles; tasks can be allocated based on interest or ability (it was Marty Ginsburg who cooked); and even the most demanding workplaces can accommodate parents with young children.

Justice Ginsburg had a rare combination of brilliance, wisdom, awareness of how law affects actual people, and ability to make lasting human connections - with her clients, her colleagues, her staff and others. Her connections to the lived lives of people is reflected in her judicial decisions; for example, her dissent in Lily Ledbetter's case described workplace "realities" in which gendered compensation disparities "are often hidden from sight."

Our world was greatly enhanced by her life. And our world is greatly diminished by her passing. She will be much missed and long remembered.
Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
RBG was tenacious, unflappable, and deeply wise. She was a visionary in the fight for women's equality, and she was a fighter until the end. She was as careful with her drafting as she was brave in her argument and powerful in her reasoning. She was grace and grit combined, and she never lost sight of the impact law can have on people's lives.

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Harvard community reflects on the life, achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law Special Adviser for Public Service, Harvard Law School Almost a decade ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg received an honorary degree from Harvard, joining a star-studded list of other luminaries being similarly honored that day. As each honorand was called up to receive a degree from then-President Drew Faust, the crowd responded with warm appreciation.

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How a scholar, advocate, and judge upended the entirety of American political thought.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, scholar, lawyer, judge, and Justice, died on Friday at the age of eighty-seven. Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women. Aside from Thurgood Marshall, no single American has so wholly advanced the cause of equality under the law.

The change Ginsburg ushered into American politics began a half century ago, and reckoning with its magnitude requires measuring the distance between now and then. At the time, only three in a hundred legal professionals and fewer than two hundred of the nation's ten thousand judges were women. In 1971, as Richard Nixon prepared to make two appointments to the Supreme Court, he faced a dilemma. Yet another Southerner he'd tapped had been nixed for an opposition to desegregation, so Nixon decided to look for someone who was, preferably, not a racist. He considered naming a woman. "I'm not for women, frankly, in any job," he told his aides, in a little fit of hysterics. "Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet." He didn't think women should be educated, or "ever be allowed to vote, even." But, given the momentum of the women's-rights movement, he conceded the political necessity of naming a woman to the bench: it might gain him a small but crucial number of votes in the upcoming election. "It's like the Negro vote," he said. "It's a hell of a thing." Then Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a similar huff, told Nixon that, if he were to nominate a woman, he'd resign. In the end, Nixon named Lewis Powell.

While all these men were dithering, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was working for the A.C.L.U., writing the brief for a case set to go before the Court, Reed v. Reed. Decided on November 22, 1971, weeks after Powell's confirmation hearings, Reed v. Reed upended a century of American jurisprudence and the entirety of political thought going back to the beginning of the Republic. Before 1971, as Ginsburg would later write, "Neither legislators nor judges regarded gender lines as 'back of the bus' regulations. Rather, these rules were said to place women on a pedestal." Thomas Jefferson had taken the trouble to explain that women had no part in the Framers' understanding of the government devised by the Constitution. "Were our state a pure democracy," he wrote, "there would yet be excluded from their deliberations . . . women; who, to prevent deprivation of morals, and ambiguity of issues, could not mix promiscuously in the public gatherings of men." Women were to be excluded for their own protection. The early women's-rights movement, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, had not defeated that argument, and the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, did not explicitly-or implicitly, according to the Court-bar discrimination on the basis of sex. In 1873, ruling on a case in which Myra Bradwell had sued the state of Illinois for denying her the right to practice law, one Supreme Court Justice explained his logic this way: "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life." That, as Ginsburg liked to say, was a cage, pretending to be a pedestal.

Reed v. Reed, in 1971, involved an Idaho statute that gave preference to men-"males must be preferred to females"-in executing estates. The Court, following Ginsburg's brief, ruled for the first time that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the majority, Burger used language that had been introduced by Ginsburg: "To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and whatever may be said as to the positive values of avoiding intrafamily controversy, the choice in this context may not lawfully be mandated solely on the basis of sex." Just a few years later, Ginsburg was arguing her own cases before the Court, and the Chief Justice was stumbling over how to address her. "Mrs. Bader? Mrs. Ginsburg?"

Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and went to Cornell, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married and enrolled at Harvard Law School, which had only just begun admitting women. Ginsburg raised their baby, and also cared for Marty, who was diagnosed with cancer, and then she followed him to New York, finishing her law degree at Columbia. She faced discrimination on the basis of sex at every stage of her career. Tied for first in her class at Columbia, she was unable to get a job practicing law at a New York firm. But, far from being defeated by discrimination, she decided to study it. She began teaching at Rutgers in 1963; in 1969, the year her second child entered nursery school, she was promoted to full professor, and began volunteering for the A.C.L.U., where she later headed the Women's Rights Project.

In 1972, just two months after the Court handed down its ruling in Reed v. Reed, Ginsburg became the first woman to hold a full professorship at Columbia. "The only confining thing for me is time," she told the New York Times. "I'm not going to curtail my activities in any way to please them." While teaching at Columbia, Ginsburg argued six cases before the Court, and won four. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in a Profile of Ginsburg, she took a crucial tip from the woman who typed her briefs. "I was doing all these sex-discrimination cases, and my secretary said, 'I look at these pages and all I see is sex, sex, sex. The judges are men, and when they read that they're not going to be thinking about what you want them to think about,' " Ginsburg said. She decided to rename this type of complaint "gender discrimination."

Ginsburg sometimes said that tackling gender discrimination, case by case, was like "knitting a sweater," a phrase perhaps meant to disarm her opponents. The actual sweater should have been a constitutional amendment. Ginsburg advocated, vehemently, for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1972; she argued that it looked "toward a legal system in which each person will be judged on individual merit and not on the basis of an unalterable trait of birth." And she regretted the Court's logic in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, a case decided not on an equal-rights argument but on a privacy one. (As I pointed out in a 2018 essay, when asked by the A.C.L.U. to take on the defense of Roe, Ginsburg declined.) In 1980, when Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the D.C. Circuit Court, an aide in Strom Thurmond's office, at her confirmation hearings, called her a "one-issue woman." Thurmond was the only member of the committee to vote against her.

Ginsburg's position on Roe earned her the ire of many feminists who failed to support her nomination to the Supreme Court, in 1993. "My approach, I believe, is neither liberal nor conservative," she told the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Joe Biden. That her nomination had been uncontroversial is entirely a myth, as is the idea that her opinions, after her confirmation, were caustic and biting, the "Ginsburns" of her character on "Saturday Night Live." Ginsburg believed in the body of the Court, in collegiality of argument, and in moderation of expression. She was famously, even maddeningly, careful. She took so much time thinking about what people said to her, and choosing her own words, Toobin reported, that "her clerks came up with what they call the two-Mississippi rule: after speaking, wait two beats before you say anything else."

Her most significant opinions were those she wrote for the majority, including in U.S. v. Virginia, a 1996 case in which the Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute's refusal to enroll female students violated the equal-protection clause. Ginsburg's opinion served as a history lesson, partly for the public and partly for her fellow-Justices. "Through a century plus three decades and more, women did not count among voters composing 'We the People,' " she wrote. "Not until 1920 did women gain a constitutional right to the franchise. And for a half century thereafter, it remained the prevailing doctrine that government, both federal and state, could withhold from women opportunities accorded men so long as any 'basis in reason' could be conceived for the discrimination." The turning point, she observed, had come in Reed v. Reed: "In 1971, for the first time in our Nation's history, this Court ruled in favor of a woman who complained that her State had denied her the equal protection of its laws."

Of course, the real turning point had come when Ginsburg joined the bench. For most of Ginsburg's career, the Court had been fairly moderate. It was not until the nineteen-eighties, when Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia, that modern conservatives began to join the Court. During Ginsburg's tenure, George W. Bush appointed Justices Roberts and Alito, and Trump appointed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. As the Court shifted, Ginsburg was cast as its Great Dissenter, though the role went largely against her disposition. Ginsburg cherished honest disagreement, firmly expressed, but she disliked petty, scathing opinions. In "Speaking in a Judicial Voice," a lecture she delivered in 1992, the year before she joined the Court, she condemned "the immoderate tone of statements diverging from the positions of the court's majority." "The most effective dissent," she wrote, "spells out differences without jeopardizing collegiality or public respect for and confidence in the judiciary."

She stood by that, even as she found herself writing more and more separate opinions, a turn that began with Bush v. Gore (2000), in which she objected to the majority's decision to halt the recount in Florida. "The Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested," she wrote. "Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States." At the conclusion of that opinion, she allowed a rare breach of decorum, writing not "Respectfully, I dissent," but, with a quiet fury, "I dissent."

Ginsburg's dissents carried a particular power, not only rhetorically but politically. On the Roberts Court, she became the leader of the liberal wing, and, in 2007, in a case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor for Goodyear Tires, she wrote a dissent objecting to the majority's denial of an argument about sex discrimination in employment. That opinion was so compelling that it led to the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed by Barack Obama in 2009. And perhaps Ginsburg's most resonant dissent, in light of this year's election, is the one she wrote in Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, in which the majority all but struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act, on the basis of the bizarre argument that it (and one of its features, known as "preclearance") had effectively solved voter suppression for posterity. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes," Ginsburg wrote, "is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." When she read the dissent aloud in Court, as Jane Sherron De Hart observed in a recent biography, she added a conclusion that was not in the written version. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," she said, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. But it only bends that way, she went on, "if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion." Much that Ginsburg predicted about the stripping away of voting rights has come to pass.

During Ginsburg's final two decades on the court, she fought colon cancer (first diagnosed in 1999), pancreatic cancer (2009), underwent heart surgery (2014), suffered injuries from falls (2012 and 2018), underwent surgery for malignancies on her left lung (2018), and had radiation when the pancreatic cancer returned (2019). She seldom missed a day in court. She also regrettably, and presumably thinking Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016, resisted calls to retire during Obama's second term, when he could have appointed a liberal Justice as her successor.

The pleasure Ginsburg took in her own celebrity, as she became a feminist icon, is understandable, if also troubling. Historically, the Court is meant to be insulated from public opinion, which also requires of the Justices that they lead largely private lives. Ginsburg was by no means the first to flout this convention, but she flouted it considerably, appearing on late-night television shows and becoming the subject of documentaries, feature films, and books for children. She spoke, in the last years of her life, to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. And she came to regret the changes to the Court itself, the way hyperpolarization had transformed the nomination and confirmation process. "I wish I could wave a magic wand and have it go back to the way it was," she said in 2018, after the Kavanaugh hearings.

There is no magic wand, and there is no going back. The Supreme Court, like much of the rest of the federal government, is at risk of becoming an instrument of the executive instead of a check against it. Preserving the Court's independence will require courage and conviction of Ginsburgian force. And there are changes, too, that most of us would never want undone. A century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's pioneering career as a scholar, advocate, and judge stands as a monument to the power of dissent. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. It took centuries, and tens of millions of women, to dismantle that nonsense. And no single one of them was more important than Ginsburg, warm-hearted, razor-sharp, and dauntless.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Great Equalizer

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How a scholar, advocate, and judge upended the entirety of American political thought. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, scholar, lawyer, judge, and Justice, died on Friday at the age of eighty-seven. Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women.

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CT.gov - Connecticut's Official State Website

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The Legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg created a powerful reaction due to her enormous influence on the Court and our nation. Justice Ginsburg fought for and won important victories that made ours a more equal society.

"Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy," she once stated. Comments reflective of her fierce advocacy for gender equality.

Commissioner Vannessa Dorantes referred to her as, "a tremendous titan and warrior in a small physical body." Furthermore, "may we all actively challenge injustice and dissent against unfairness in memory of RBG... the epitome of strength."

While she is greatly missed, Justice Ginsburg has left us a treasure trove of important decisions and statements articulating her vision and ideals that will be with us forever.

The full article can be accessed here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-advice-for-living.html

In 2016, she wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled, "Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Advice for Living." Here, she gives credit to so many for her achievements in life especially the early experiences she had raising her own daughter. "My success in law school, I have no doubt, was in large measure because of baby Jane," she wrote.

Assistant Legal Director Katherine Dwyer provided her thoughts on the life and career of this remarkable woman. "Justice Ginsburg was a trailblazer, and the impact she had in the struggle towards gender equality cannot be overstated. Moreover, she was a woman of strong convictions and beliefs and her steadfastness to those convictions earned her the "Notorious RBG" moniker. Her work as an attorney and later a Supreme Court Justice was her passion and her calling. In that respect, she reminds me of so many of our staff here at DCF, who work long and hard on a daily basis to improve the lives of others because this is more than a job, it's a calling. Rest in Peace, Justice Ginsburg. You are sorely missed."

Some of Justice Ginsburg's most memorable quotes are as follows:

- "We should learn ... to do our best for the sake of our communities and for the sake of those for whom we pave the way."

- "So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

- "So that's the dissenter's hope. That they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow."

- "I didn't change the Constitution; the equality principle was there from the start. I just was an advocate for seeing its full realization."

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The passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg created a powerful reaction due to her enormous influence on the Court and our nation. Justice Ginsburg fought for and won important victories that made ours a more equal society.

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On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87. The pint-sized powerhouse broke barriers both in her personal and professional life to become a Supreme Court Judge and pop culture icon. Here's what makes RBG's accomplishments so groundbreaking.

She fought tirelessly for gender equality under the law. She battled sexism in her own life and career. She juggled motherhood and caring for her cancer-stricken husband while still in law school. As a Supreme Court Justice, she was a role model for what every young girl (and every adult woman, for that matter) is capable of achieving. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What makes RBG, as she is known, such a force of nature? "She understood exactly what kind of change she wanted to make-and be-in the world because she had experienced it so personally," says Katherine Franke, Columbia Law School professor and Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, who was a part of a symposium in 2013 in honor of Justice Ginsburg. In their book Notorious RBG, lawyer Shana Knizhnik, who started the viral "Notorious RBG" Tumblr, and journalist Irin Carmon write, "RBG is a woman who, to use another phrase that mattered a lot to her, defied stereotypes...RBG was already a radical just by being herself-a woman who beat the odds to make her mark."

Up until the end of her life, the octogenarian showed no signs of slowing down. Take a look at some of Justice Ginsburg's amazing achievements.

She graduated first in her class from Columbia Law School

Encouraged to pursue education by her mother, Ginsburg graduated in 1954 from Cornell University, where she met her future husband, Martin, then got married and had her first child. Two years later, she went on to law school at Harvard, one of nine women in a class of 500, and transferred to Columbia when her husband got a job in New York. "The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your BA, but your MRS," Ginsburg said, according to the ACLU. She decided to go to law school for "personal, selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer's job better than any other." RBG wasn't wrong: She tied for first in her class at Columbia.

She battled-and overcame-sexism personally

But her educational victories weren't without struggle. "Ginsburg comes from the generation of women who had to be three times better than men in order to get half the recognition of the average man-this was surely her experience at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools," Franke says. "Her professors in law school were no doubt unfamiliar with having an outstanding female student in their classrooms." One professor even offered to give Ginsburg answers on a test in exchange for sex. Yet, unlike many women of her time, she didn't accept that kind of treatment as just the way things were. "I went to his office and I said, 'How dare you! How dare you do this!' and that was the end of that," she said last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary premiered.

She was the first person on both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews

While in law school, Ginsburg experienced sexism not only from her professors but her fellow students as well. "I imagine that the hazing she got from her male classmates was even worse than the discriminatory treatment she experienced from her professors," Franke says. "They were not going to tolerate a woman besting them in their classes." Even so, Ginsburg became the first person, male or female, to become a member of both the Harvard and the Columbia Law Reviews, student-run journals of legal scholarship.

She became the second female law professor at Rutgers-and fought for equal pay

John Duricka/AP/Shutterstock

Even with all her law school accolades, Ginsburg faced more discrimination when looking for a job after graduating. "I struck out on three grounds," she said in 1993 of her trouble getting hired. "I was Jewish, a woman, and a mother. The first raised one eyebrow; the second, two; the third made me indubitably inadmissible."

Eventually, she became one of a handful of female law professors in the country when she was hired in 1963 at Rutgers Law School-but as the second female law professor there, she still had to fight for pay equality. When asked why a male counterpart was being paid more, "the dean replied, 'Ruth, he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good-paying job in New York,'" Ginsburg said at Sundance. "That was the very year the Equal Pay Act had passed, that was the answer I got." So, she and other female employees filed an Equal Pay Act complaint-and won.

She co-founded the first law journal on women's rights

At her students' request in 1969, Ginsburg started teaching a seminar on women and the law. "Rutgers students sparked my interest and aided in charting the course I then pursued," Ginsburg said in a short film by the university. As she began to find her niche in women's legal rights, she co-founded and became the faculty advisor for the first law journal to focus on the topic, the Women's Rights Law Reporter. "As faculty advisor, Professor Ginsburg devoted many hours to writing and editing, counseling the staff, attending meetings, and inevitably mediating with the administration when problems arose," writes co-founder Elizabeth Langer on Columbia's Barnard College website. "Forty years later, it is still publishing at Rutgers Law School-the first among many current legal publications devoted to women's issues."

She became the first tenured female law professor at Columbia

Ginsburg became the first tenured female Columbia Law School professor after joining the faculty in 1972. "It must have been exhilarating for the female students at Columbia when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hired as a tenured professor," Franke says. "It is so important for students to see themselves reflected in the person standing at the front of the room." At the same time, "the pressures on Professor Ginsburg to be an exemplar for her sex were surely weighty. It's never easy being the first and the only representative of your class of people." While at Columbia, she co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination in 1974.

But RBG didn't see her employer as above the law, no matter what position it had afforded her: She championed the rights of the school's female maids, who were being laid off before the male janitors; she also fought on behalf of female employees to receive the same retirement benefits as men. Again and again, she won. Ginsburg was becoming one of the inspiring women who are changing the lives of women.

She co-founded the Women's Rights Project at ACLU

Also in 1972, she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), as the organization began referring sex-discrimination cases to her. She took up the mantle of litigating gender inequality cases with measured, conservative baby steps, tackling one law at a time, because she thought radical change would be too much too soon. But still, Ginsburg was growing into her role as one of the 30 women pioneers who changed the world.

"As we feminists like to say, 'the personal is the political'-especially so for RBG," Franke says. Although discrimination on the basis of sex still occurs, "what's different now is that the law prohibits these forms of inequality. Her work was instrumental in changing the law to secure women's equality in the workplace [and elsewhere] as a legal norm."

She argued six cases before the Supreme Court-and won five

During the 1970s, she brought six cases before the Supreme Court, winning all but one. Ironically, "RBG's signature approach to combatting sexism was bringing lawsuits on behalf of men who were being treated unequally because of their sex," Franke says. "Her thinking was that male judges would appreciate the injustice in a case where men were the victims, and in winning those cases she was building the scaffolding for addressing the sexism women suffered. As an initial approach to combating sexism, Ginsburg's strategy was extremely effective." For example, in Duren v. Missouri, she argued and won on behalf of a male convict who felt his right to a jury chosen from a fair cross-section of his community was violated because it didn't include women, whose jury duty was voluntary.

Ginsburg has also said her legal successes were due in large part to an approach her secretary, Milicent Tryon, suggested. "I owe it all to my secretary at Columbia Law School, who said, 'I'm typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word 'sex, sex, sex' is on every page," Ginsburg said in 1993 at a Columbia Law Women's Association discussion. "'Don't you know that those nine men [on the Supreme Court], when they hear that word, their first association is not what you want them to be thinking about? Why don't you use the word "gender"?'"

She became the first female Jewish Supreme Court justice

Mark Reinstein/Shutterstock

Ginsburg went from arguing cases before the Supreme Court to hearing them. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. "Early on, my mom followed my dad to New York, and, later on, he followed her to Washington," son James Ginsburg, who was born in 1965, told the New Yorker. Then in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. She became the second female justice (after Sandra Day O'Connor), the first Jewish justice since 1969, and the first female Jewish justice ever.

She's one of only four females justices in history

Ginsburg has gone on to hit more milestones during her lifetime appointment to the Court: She became the only female justice on the bench between O'Connor's retirement in 2006 and Sonia Sotomayor's appointment in 2009. Currently, there are three with the addition of Elena Kagan in 2010; but to put this in perspective, out of all the 114 Supreme Court Justices ever, 110 (96.5 percent) have been men. "I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And when I say when there are nine, people are shocked," Ginsburg said at a conference in 2012. "But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Since 2010, RBG was also the most senior justice on the bench.

She had "In the year of Our Lord" removed from Supreme Court bar certificates

At the Washington, D.C. synagogue Adas Israel Congregation in 2018, Ginsburg described how at the beginning of her time as a justice, she was asked to speak up on behalf of Jewish attorneys of the Supreme Court Bar who did not want "In the Year of Our Lord" to be written on their membership certificates. "Every year they would get half a dozen or so complaints from Orthodox Jews who said, 'We're so proud of our membership in the Supreme Court Bar, but we can't frame our certificate and put it on the wall because it says, 'In the Year of Our Lord,' and he's not our lord," Ginsburg said. Another justice, whose name she would not reveal, told her the wording was good enough for the five Jewish justices before her. "I said, 'It's not good enough for Ginsburg,'" she remembered. After speaking with Chief Justice John Roberts, the wording was changed to simply the year if members preferred. "Now it's the way it should be-it's your choice," she said.

She gained notice for her impassioned dissents

As a Supreme Court Justice, Ginsburg became known for not only her powerful majority opinions but also fiery dissents. (To answer one of the political questions you've been embarrassed to ask, that's the opinion that goes against the majority.) In her dissents, she wrote, and later took to reading out loud from the bench, in colloquial language that broke with legal tradition and even called upon Congress to change unfair laws. Franke's favorite Ginsburg dissent was one of those law-changing cases, 2007's Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. In this case, the majority found the female plaintiff's claim to sex-based pay discrimination was not valid because the statute of limitations had run out (she had found out about it after working there for many years). "Justice Ginsburg's dissent for four members of the Court was a classic example of a justice educating her colleagues," Franke says. Ginsburg "explained to the other members of the Court, as well as the public, how discrimination works, pointing out how ludicrous the majority's approach to the law was in light of how discrimination operates in the real world."

In 2009, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which relaxed the statute of limitations on fair pay complaints and became one of the moments that changed women's history. "I like to think most of my dissents will be the law someday," Ginsburg said at the University of Michigan in 2015.

She was the first justice to officiate a same-sex marriage

RBG has taken her crusade to end sex discrimination even further with her support of same-sex marriage, which was made legal under federal law in 2015. In 2013, just after the Supreme Court struck down two laws restricting same-sex marriage, Ginsburg became the first Supreme Court justice to officiate one, at the wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser to economist John Roberts in Washington, DC. "I think of how the constitution begins: 'We the people of the United States, in order to form a perfect union,'" Ginsburg said of Constitutional rights in a 2014 interview. "But we're still striving for that more perfect union. And one of the perfections is for 'we the people' to include an ever enlarged group."

She and her daughter became the first mother-daughter to teach on the same law faculty

Coming full circle, RBG has inspired the next generation of women to pursue the law-including her own daughter, Jane. The younger Ginsburg followed in her mother's footsteps to become a law professor at Columbia, where she still teaches today. "I believe we are the first mother-daughter law school teaching team," RBG wrote on a Columbia Reunion questionnaire. On another reunion questionnaire under "Memorable Law School Moments," the elder Ginsburg wrote, "Now Columbia Law Professor Jane C. Ginsburg, then age four, called out from a Kent Library balcony seat as I received my diploma, 'That's my Mommy!'"

They are also the first mother-daughter pair to attend Harvard Law School (where Jane graduated from). Receiving an award at Harvard presented by Jane, RBG said with emotion, "An award from one's child, as all parents here know, is something truly to cherish."

She's the only Supreme Court Justice to become a pop culture icon

Cliff Owen/AP/Shutterstock

Before her death, Ginsburg was at the height of her popularity as young people continued to embrace her as a role model for justice, perseverance, and female empowerment. Her trademark glasses, bun, and fancy jabots (the lace collars she's fond of) make her a favorite for Halloween costumes. Internet memes aplenty began with then-law student Shana Knizhnik's "Notorious RBG" Tumblr (now a book): A takeoff of the late, very large rapper known as "Notorious BIG," the nickname highlighted the juxtaposition between the modest manner of the diminutive justice and her tremendous force on the bench. Kate McKinnon's hilarious impersonation of RBG on Saturday Night Live ends with the line, "You've been Gins-burned!" ("I would like to say 'Gins-burned' sometimes to my colleagues," RBG quipped at Sundance.) In addition to the Oscar-nominated documentary , Felicity Jones portrayed Ginsburg in the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex. "I have no doubt that Justice Ginsburg will persist until she takes her last breath, which I hope is many years from now," Franke says. Next up? Ginsburg would love an Equal Rights Amendment. Plus, Ginsburg is being honored on one of the new 2023 postage stamps.

Now read up on some of Ginsburg's best quotes.
Sources:

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15 Ways Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Made History

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On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87. The pint-sized powerhouse broke barriers both in her personal and professional life to become a Supreme Court Judge and pop culture icon. Here's what makes RBG's accomplishments so groundbreaking. She fought tirelessly for gender equality under the law.

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Affectionately called "R.B.G." by her supporters, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has inspired generations of women to break gender barriers. Even after facing gender discrimination as she pursued her academic goals, Ginsburg forged ahead and became the second woman--and first Jewish woman--to serve on the Supreme Court.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Born to a Jewish family, her father Nathan Bader immigrated to the United States, while her mother Celia Amster Bader was a native of New York. Ginsburg's family valued education and instilled in her a love of learning. She attended P.S. 238 for elementary school and James Madison High School in Brooklyn before continuing on to attend Cornell University. Ginsburg graduated from Cornell with a bachelor's degree in 1954, earning high honors in Government and distinction in all subjects. She was also the College of Arts and Sciences Class Marshal. That same year, she married Martin D. Ginsburg and the couple have two children together.

After graduating from Cornell, Ginsburg subsequently started attending Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, Ginsburg was one of only 9 women in a class of 500 students. She often faced gender discrimination and was asked to explain how she felt about taking a spot in the program instead of a man. Ginsburg and her female colleagues were called on in class for "comic relief" and they were even excluded from using certain sections of the library. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School in 1958 for her final year. During her studies, she made both the Harvard and Columbia Law Review. Ginsburg graduated with her law degree from Columbia in 1959 at the top of her class. However, even with all of her academic accomplishments, it was hard for her to find employment after graduation. She explained, "In the fifties, the traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews. ... But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot, that combination was a bit much." Ginsburg was able to land a position as a law clerk for the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1959. She served in that office until 1961.

Following her clerkship, Ginsburg began working as a research associate for the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. After a year as a research associate, she became the associate director and continued in that position for a year. In 1963, Ginsburg began as a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law and taught classes until 1972. She also became involved with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and she was central to the founding of their Women's Rights Project in 1971. Ginsburg returned to Columbia Law School in 1972, where she became the first woman hired to receive tenure. While teaching at Columbia, she also served as the general counsel for the ACLU from 1973-1980 and on the National Board of Directors from 1974-1980. During that time, she became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977-1978.

Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. She served there for thirteen years, prior to being nominated as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She accepted his nomination and took her seat as a Supreme Court Justice on August 10, 1993. She became the second woman, and first Jewish woman, to serve on the Supreme Court. During her tenure as a justice, Ginsburg has fiercely advocated for gender equality and women's rights. For example, she wrote the court's opinion in the United States v. Virginia case, ruling that qualified women could not be denied admission to the Virginia Military Institute. She was also a voice of dissent to the court's decision in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. case, denying a woman's gender pay discrimination claim. Ginsburg subsequently worked with President Barack Obama in 2009 on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to combat pay disparities. At eighty-seven years old, Ginsburg continued to work for gender equality as a Supreme Court Justice.

Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020 due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.

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Affectionately called "R.B.G." by her supporters, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has inspired generations of women to break gender barriers. Even after facing gender discrimination as she pursued her academic goals, Ginsburg forged ahead and became the second woman--and first Jewish woman--to serve on the Supreme Court.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, née Joan Ruth Bader, (born March 15, 1933, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.-died September 18, 2020, Washington, D.C.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 to 2020. She was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Joan Ruth Bader was the younger of the two children of Nathan Bader, a merchant, and Celia Bader. Her elder sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at the age of six, when Joan was 14 months old. Outside her family, Ginsburg began to go by the name "Ruth" in kindergarten to help her teachers distinguish her from other students named Joan. The Baders were an observant Jewish family, and Ruth attended synagogue and participated in Jewish traditions as a child. She excelled in school, where she was heavily involved in student activities and earned excellent grades.

At about the time when Ruth started high school, Celia was diagnosed with cancer. She died of the disease four years later, just days before Ruth's scheduled graduation ceremony, which Ruth could not attend.

Ruth entered Cornell University on a full scholarship. During her first semester, she met her future husband, Martin ("Marty") Ginsburg, who was also a student at Cornell. Martin, who eventually became a nationally prominent tax attorney, exerted an important influence on Ruth through his strong and sustained interest in her intellectual pursuits. She was also influenced by two other people-both professors-whom she met at Cornell: the author Vladimir Nabokov, who shaped her thinking about writing, and the constitutional lawyer Robert Cushman, who inspired her to pursue a legal career. Martin and Ruth were married in June 1954, nine days after she graduated from Cornell.

After Martin was drafted into the U.S. Army, the Ginsburgs spent two years in Oklahoma, where he was stationed. Their daughter, Jane, their first child, was born during this time. The Ginsburgs then moved to Massachusetts, where Martin resumed-and Ruth began-studies at Harvard Law School. While Ruth completed her coursework and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review (she was the first woman to do so), she acted as caregiver not only to Jane but also to Martin, who had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. After his recovery, Martin graduated and accepted a job with a law firm in New York City. Ruth completed her legal education at Columbia Law School, serving on the law review and graduating in a tie for first place in her class in 1959.

Despite her excellent credentials, she struggled to find employment as a lawyer, because of her gender and the fact that she was a mother. At the time, only a very small percentage of lawyers in the United States were women, and only two women had ever served as federal judges. However, one of her Columbia law professors advocated on her behalf and helped to convince Judge Edmund Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to offer Ginsburg a clerkship (1959-61). As associate director of the Columbia Law School's Project on International Procedure (1962-63), she studied Swedish civil procedure; her research was eventually published in a book, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), cowritten with Anders Bruzelius.

Hired by the Rutgers School of Law as an assistant professor in 1963, she was asked by the dean of the school to accept a low salary because of her husband's well-paying job. After she became pregnant with the couple's second child-a son, James, born in 1965-Ginsburg wore oversized clothes for fear that her contract would not be renewed. She earned tenure at Rutgers in 1969.

In 1970 Ginsburg became professionally involved in the issue of gender equality when she was asked to introduce and moderate a law student panel discussion on the topic of "women's liberation." In 1971 she published two law review articles on the subject and taught a seminar on gender discrimination. As a part of the course, Ginsburg partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases. The first (originally brought to her attention by her husband) involved a provision of the federal tax code that denied single men a tax deduction for serving as caregivers to their families. The second involved an Idaho state law that expressly preferred men to women in determining who should administer the estates of people who die without a will ( see intestate succession). The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the latter case, Reed v. Reed (1971), was the first in which a gender-based statute was struck down on the basis of the equal protection clause.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Ginsburg was a leading figure in gender-discrimination litigation. In 1972 she became founding counsel of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and coauthored a law-school casebook on gender discrimination. In the same year, she became the first tenured female faculty member at Columbia Law School. She authored dozens of law review articles and drafted or contributed to many Supreme Court briefs on the issue of gender discrimination. During the decade, she argued before the Supreme Court six times, winning five cases.

In 1980 Democratic U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. While serving as a judge on the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg developed a reputation as a pragmatic liberal with a keen attention to detail. She enjoyed cordial professional relationships with two well-known conservative judges on the court, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, and often voted with them. In 1993 she delivered the Madison Lecture at New York University Law School, offering a critique of the reasoning-though not the ultimate holding-of Roe v. Wade (1973), the famous case in which the Supreme Court found a constitutional right of women to choose to have an abortion. Ginsburg argued that the Court should have issued a more limited decision, which would have left more room for state legislatures to address specific details. Such an approach, she claimed, "might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."

On June 14, 1993, Democratic U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton announced his nomination of Ginsburg to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Byron White. Her confirmation hearings were quick and relatively uncontroversial. She was endorsed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the full Senate on August 3 by a vote of 96-3.

On the Court, Ginsburg became known for her active participation in oral arguments and her habit of wearing jabots, or collars, with her judicial robes, some of which expressed a symbolic meaning. She identified, for example, both a majority-opinion collar and a dissent collar. Early in her tenure on the Court, Ginsburg wrote the majority's opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which held that the men-only admission policy of a state-run university, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), violated the equal protection clause. Rejecting VMI's contention that its program of military-focused education was unsuitable for women, Ginsburg noted that the program was in fact unsuitable for the vast majority of Virginia college students regardless of gender. "[G]eneralizations about 'the way women are,' estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," she wrote.

Although Ginsburg tended to vote with other liberal justices on the Court, she got along well with most of the conservative justices who had been appointed before her. She enjoyed a special connection with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative and the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, and she and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia famously bonded over their shared love of opera (indeed, the American composer-lyricist Derrick Wang wrote a successful comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, celebrating their relationship). She praised the work of the first chief justice with whom she served, William Rehnquist, another conservative. Ginsburg had less in common with most of the justices appointed by Republican U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, however.

Ginsburg attracted attention for several strongly worded dissenting opinions and publicly read some of her dissents from the bench to emphasize the importance of the case. Two such decisions in 2007 concerned women's rights. The first, Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act on a 5-4 vote. Ginsburg decried the judgment as "alarming," arguing that it "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right [the right of women to choose to have an abortion] declared again and again by this Court." Similarly, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, another 5-4 decision, Ginsburg criticized the majority's holding that a woman could not bring a federal civil suit against her employer for having paid her less than it had paid men (the plaintiff did not become aware of her right to file suit until after the filing period had passed). Ginsburg argued that the majority's reasoning was inconsistent with the will of the U.S. Congress-a view that was somewhat vindicated when Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first bill that Democratic U.S. Pres. Barack Obama signed into law.

With the retirements of Justices David Souter in 2009 and John Paul Stevens in 2010, Ginsburg became the most senior justice within the liberal bloc. She wrote dissents articulating liberal perspectives in several more prominent and politically charged cases. Her partial dissent in the Affordable Care Act cases (2012), which posed a constitutional challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as "Obamacare"), criticized her five conservative colleagues for concluding-in her view contrary to decades of judicial precedent-that the commerce clause did not empower Congress to require most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court's conservative majority struck down as unconstitutional Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which had required certain states and local jurisdictions to obtain prior approval ("preclearance") from the federal Justice Department of any proposed changes to voting laws or procedures. Ginsburg, in dissent, criticized the "hubris" of the majority's "demolition of the VRA" and declared that "throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Ginsburg was likewise highly critical of the majority's opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), a decision that recognized the right of for-profit corporations to refuse on religious grounds to comply with the Affordable Care Act's requirement that employers pay for coverage of certain contraceptive drugs and devices in their employees' health insurance plans. Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion "falters at each step of its analysis" and expressed concern that the Court had "ventured into a minefield" by holding "that commercial enterprises...can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs." Throughout her career Ginsburg concluded her dissents with the phrase "I dissent," rather than the conventional and more common "I respectfully dissent," which she considered an unnecessary (and slightly disingenuous) nicety.

In part because of her increasing outspokenness, Ginsburg became, during the Obama administration (2009-17), a progressive and feminist folk hero. Inspired by some of her dissents, a second-year law student at New York University created a Tumblr blog entitled "Notorious R.B.G."-a play on "Notorious B.I.G.," the stage name of the American rapper Christopher Wallace-which became a popular nickname for Ginsburg among her admirers. Nevertheless, some liberals, citing Ginsburg's advanced age and concerns about her health (she was twice a cancer survivor) and apparent frailty, argued that she should retire in order to allow Obama to nominate a liberal replacement. Others, however, pointed to her vigorous exercise routine and the fact that she had never missed an oral argument to urge that she should remain on the Court for as long as possible. For her own part, Ginsburg expressed her intention to continue for as long as she was able to perform her job "full steam." On the day after Martin Ginsburg died in 2010, she went to work at the Court as usual because, she said, it was what he would have wanted.

In an interview in 2016 Ginsburg expressed dismay at the possibility that Republican candidate Donald Trump would be elected president-a statement that was widely criticized as not in keeping with the Court's tradition of staying out of politics. (Ginsburg later said that she regretted the remark.) Trump's electoral victory renewed criticism of Ginsburg for not having retired while Obama was president. She remained on the Court as its oldest justice, publicly mindful of John Paul Stevens's service until the age of 90.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 to 2020. The second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she became an articulate representative of liberal perspectives on the Court and eventually the leader of the Court's minority liberal bloc.

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Biographies of Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She…