Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Six Decades of Expanding Gender Equality in the Law, in the Judiciary, and for the Country

On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, passed away. In her sixty years as part of the legal community, Ginsburg served just short of thirty years on the Supreme Court, thirteen years as a justice for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, two years as a law clerk, and two decades as a professor and advocate. In those six decades of service, Justice Ginsburg, just the second female Supreme Court justice, had tremendous impact on gender equality both on and off the bench.

Following her clerkship, Ginsburg moved onto work as a research associate at Columbia Law School before becoming a professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law and later Columbia, notably achieving the honor of first female professor at Columbia to earn tenure. While working as a professor, Ginsburg embarked on what would be a decade-long partnership with the ACLU. Ginsburg’s partnership with the ACLU, and later as founding counsel of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, in the 1970s, resulted in landmark Supreme Court cases that established equal treatment in the law for women and men. Those cases took on equal rights for both men and women, such as earning single men the family caregiver tax deduction or striking down an Idaho law that gave men preference over women as intestate administrators.

Ginsburg left teaching and advocating behind when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980. Thirteen years later, President Bill Clinton appointed Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. Justice Ginsburg was approved with 96 yeas, making her the second female to hold a seat on the Court. As an associate justice to the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Virginia, which held that the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee precludes reserving exclusively to men a unique educational opportunity.

In 2006, then the only female on the bench following Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement, Justice Ginsburg delivered a scathing oral dissent to the majority’s opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., stating "[t]he Court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination," and called upon Congress to act. In 2009 the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law prohibiting “sex-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same establishment who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions.”

While many of Justice Ginsburg’s cases on and off the bench are heralded as wins for women’s rights, the justice becoming a folk hero known to some as the Notorious RBG, Justice Ginsburg “believed that the law was gender-blind and all groups were entitled to equal rights.” Justice Ginsburg believed major social change should come from Congress not the courts. That is not to say the courts did not play a role. As an attorney Ginsburg was skilled at attacking specific areas of discrimination in the courts to guide the legislature on where the lines lie.

In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, while awarding Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Henry J. Friendly Medal in 2018, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was:

a loving spouse of now-departed Marty, whom we dearly miss; mother to Jane and James; a woman who keeps unusually late working hours; a judge who works quickly, routinely issuing the Court’s first or second opinion every term, even when the Chief Justice assigns her a difficult case to try to avoid having everyone else appear slow by comparison; and a cultural icon who knows much about music, nothing about football, and more than is reasonable about jabots.

Most important, she is a friend who, like Judge Friendly, makes all of us better at our common calling. Like Judge Friendly, Ruth is equal parts careful scholar and evenhanded jurist. And like Judge Friendly, she derives her authority from the strength of her contribution to a conversation, and never from its volume.

The National Center for State Courts has a long history of working to eliminate gender bias within the state courts system. Some of the more recent efforts include Trailblazing Women of the State Courts, which visits some of the first U.S. women to hold the title of judge. The Judicial Reform Around the World—Women’s Rights resource provides access to information on women on the bench around the world, focusing, in part, on increasing the number of women on the bench and associations for female judges, in addition to women’s rights around the world. Resources include the National Association of Women Judges midyear 2010 meeting honoring Justice Ginsburg, Justice Sotomayor, and Lady Hale of Richmond, where the honorees spoke on their experiences as judges and the role of women in the legal system.

Additionally, NCSC’s Gender and Racial Fairness Resource Guide takes a domestic look at racial and gender equality; provides resources to help courts build a diverse bench and spot and address bias; and explores the experiences of female judges.  Trends: Close Up February 2017, Women on the Bench, examined the number of female justices serving in the state courts of last resort. The Institute for Court Management has also assisted with research in the area with “Ten Years Later: Did We Make A Difference? A Review of the Gender and Justice in the Courts: A Report to the Supreme Court of Georgia,” by the Commission on Gender Bias in the Judicial System.