- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959, tied for first in her class, no law firm would hire her, and Justice Felix Frankfurter turned her down for a clerkship because she was a woman. A Columbia professor, Gerald Gunther, pressed a federal judge, Edmund Palmieri, to take her on, and after that clerkship she worked on Columbia's Project on International Procedure.
In 1963 she began teaching civil procedure at Rutgers Law School. She was one of fewer than twenty women law professors in the United States, and she was paid less than the men because, she was told, her husband had a very good job. She joined an equal pay campaign that won raises for the women who complained, and she earned tenure at Rutgers in 1969.
In 1972 she returned to Columbia, this time as a member of the faculty, and became the first woman there to be granted tenure. It was the same year she launched the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. At Columbia she co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination and taught the first legal seminar on the subject. Colleagues remembered her as meticulous and demanding. One former student, Margaret Moses, joined the Women's Rights Project in 1978 specifically to work with her favourite law professor, and later co-taught a gender discrimination class with her.
Her teaching and her litigation fed each other. The arguments she developed in the classroom were tested in the Supreme Court, and the cases she won became material for her students. In 1977 and 1978 she spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, writing about her work in litigation and advocacy for equal rights.
She remained at Columbia until 1980, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. By then her casebook and seminar had helped turn sex discrimination from an afterthought into a recognised field of legal study, and she had shown that a woman could hold a tenured chair at one of the country's leading law schools.
Why it matters
Ginsburg trained a generation of lawyers to see gender equality as a constitutional issue and created teaching materials others built on.
About Ruth Bader Ginsburg
U.S. Supreme Court Justice; pioneer of gender equality jurisprudence; co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project.
More about Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Ginsburg co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights ProjectIn 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined more than 300 sex discrimination cases by 1974.
- Ginsburg co-founded the first US women's rights law journalIn 1970 Ruth Bader Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter at Rutgers, the first law journal in the United States to focus exclusively on women's rights.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg won five of six cases for equalityLong before joining the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued six sex discrimination cases before it in the 1970s and won five.
- Ginsburg's Ledbetter dissent inspired the Fair Pay ActRuth Bader Ginsburg's 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear called on Congress to act. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became law in 2009, and she was credited with inspiring it.
- Ginsburg's Olmstead ruling advanced disability rightsIn Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the ADA covers mental illness and that needlessly confining people with disabilities in institutions is discrimination.
- Ginsburg's Reed v. Reed brief won equal protection for womenRuth Bader Ginsburg wrote the brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), the first case in which the Supreme Court extended the Constitution's equal protection guarantee to women.
- Ginsburg won equal pay for women teachers at RutgersAt Rutgers Law School, Ruth Bader Ginsburg discovered she was paid less than male colleagues. She joined an equal pay campaign that won substantial raises for the women.
- Ginsburg's VMI opinion opened a military college to womenIn United States v. Virginia (1996), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion striking down the Virginia Military Institute's male-only admissions policy.
Sources
- Tribute: The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and WRP Staff American Civil Liberties Union
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wikipedia
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