A Brooklyn childhood
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a furrier and small businessman, and Celia Amster Bader. The family was Jewish and working class, and the household placed an unwavering value on education, particularly for a girl in an era that often saw little point in it. Ruth's early years were touched by loss. Her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis when Ruth was a small child, and her mother, Celia, the parent who most fiercely encouraged her ambition, died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. Celia had urged her daughter to be independent and to keep her emotions in check, advice Ruth carried for life. She grew up in the modest Flatbush neighbourhood, attended local public schools and James Madison High School, and absorbed early the lesson that learning was both a refuge and a path forward in a world that did not expect much of women.
Cornell, marriage and Harvard
Ginsburg entered Cornell University on a scholarship and graduated in 1954, first in her class among the women, having studied under teachers who included the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whom she credited with sharpening her sense of language. At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg, a fellow student who would become her husband and, unusually for the time, an equal partner who cherished her ambition rather than resenting it. They married in 1954 and soon had a daughter, Jane. Ruth then enrolled at Harvard Law School as one of only a handful of women in a class of more than five hundred men, where the dean reportedly asked the female students to justify taking places that might have gone to men. She excelled regardless, joining the prestigious law review, all while caring for a young child and nursing Martin through a serious bout of cancer, attending his classes as well as her own and typing his papers to keep him on track.
A brilliant student who could not get hired
When Martin took a job in New York, Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School for her final year, and in 1959 she graduated joint first in her class. By every measure of merit she was among the most outstanding young lawyers in the country. Yet the doors of the legal profession remained largely shut to her. Prestigious law firms and judges declined to hire a woman, and the fact that she was Jewish and a mother compounded the prejudice. One Supreme Court justice rejected her for a clerkship despite a strong recommendation. It was a formative humiliation, and a revealing one, since it showed her at first hand that discrimination was not an abstraction but a barrier that excluded even the most qualified. She eventually secured a clerkship with a federal district judge, and the experience of being underestimated despite obvious excellence would shape the cause to which she devoted the rest of her working life.
Scholar and strategist
Ginsburg's path led into academia. She learned Swedish to co-author a book on Swedish civil procedure, then became a professor at Rutgers Law School and later at Columbia, where in 1972 she became the first woman granted tenure at that law school. She also began teaching and writing about the law of sex discrimination at a moment when American law still openly treated men and women differently in matters of work, property and family. In 1972 she helped found the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, and she became its guiding legal mind. Ginsburg understood that lasting change would come not from a single dramatic case but from a patient, carefully sequenced strategy. She set out, brick by brick, to persuade the courts that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbade laws that treated people differently simply because of their sex, an argument that until then the courts had rarely entertained.
The architect of gender-equality law
Through the 1970s Ginsburg argued six cases on sex discrimination before the United States Supreme Court and won five of them. Her strategy was shrewd and is often misunderstood. She frequently chose male plaintiffs, men disadvantaged by laws that assumed women were dependants and men were breadwinners, in order to show the all-male Court that rigid gender roles harmed everyone. In Reed v. Reed she helped win the first ruling in which the Court struck down a law for discriminating on the basis of sex. In Frontiero v. Richardson and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld she dismantled rules that denied benefits on sexist assumptions. She was sometimes likened to Thurgood Marshall, who had built the legal case against racial segregation, because she was doing comparable work for sex equality, methodically and without theatrics. By the end of the decade she had reshaped the constitutional landscape, establishing that the law could no longer casually assume what women were for.
From the appeals court to the Supreme Court
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, one of the most important courts in the country. There she served for thirteen years and earned a reputation as a careful, moderate judge, respected across the political spectrum and admired for the precision of her written opinions. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court to succeed Justice Byron White. At her confirmation hearings she was candid, composed and formidable, and the Senate confirmed her by a near-unanimous vote of 96 to 3, a margin almost unimaginable in later, more polarised years. She became the second woman ever to serve on the Court and the first Jewish woman. She took her seat in August 1993 and would remain on the Court for twenty-seven years, becoming one of its most recognisable and influential members.
The justice and the dissenter
On the Court, Ginsburg's most celebrated majority opinion came in United States v. Virginia in 1996, which struck down the male-only admissions policy of the state-funded Virginia Military Institute and held that the state had failed to show an exceedingly persuasive justification for excluding women. It was, in effect, the consolidation of everything she had argued as an advocate. As the Court grew more conservative, she became known equally for her dissents. Her 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, read aloud from the bench, protested a ruling that made it harder for women to challenge unequal pay, and she pointedly called on Congress to fix the law. Congress did, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became the first bill signed by President Obama in 2009. She also dissented sharply in cases on voting rights and access to contraception, and her precise, unflinching dissents made her, late in life, an unlikely cultural icon affectionately nicknamed the Notorious RBG.
A life of friendship and resilience
An honest account of Ginsburg includes both her great loyalties and her contested choices. Her marriage to Martin Ginsburg, who became a celebrated tax lawyer and an enthusiastic cook, was a genuine partnership of equals until his death in 2010, and she often said he was the first man who cared that she had a brain. Famously, she maintained a deep personal friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite, a bond rooted in shared love of opera and law that many cited as a model of civility. She was also a survivor, beating cancer more than once while rarely missing a day on the bench. Yet she drew criticism late in life: many supporters argued she should have retired while a like-minded president could name her successor, and she made unusually public remarks about a presidential candidate in 2016 that she later acknowledged were ill-judged. These were the imperfections of a fiercely independent woman who refused to be managed.
The final years and a contested legacy
Ginsburg worked into her late eighties, returning to the bench after repeated bouts of cancer and earning a near-mythic reputation for endurance, including a famously demanding fitness regime. She died on 18 September 2020, at the age of eighty-seven, of complications from pancreatic cancer. Her death, weeks before a presidential election, immediately became the centre of a bitter national struggle over her replacement, and the swift confirmation of a very different successor reshaped the Court she had served for nearly three decades. That outcome lent a painful edge to debates over whether she should have stepped down earlier. She was the first woman and the first Jewish person to lie in state at the United States Capitol. The grief at her passing, and the crowds who gathered outside the Court, testified to how deeply her life had come to symbolise the struggle for equal dignity under the law.
Impact and legacy
Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people, most of whom will never know her name. Because of the cases she argued and won, it is now unconstitutional in the United States for the law to deny a woman a job, a benefit, a credit account or an opportunity simply because she is a woman, and the same protections shield men from sex-based assumptions. Her work helped open military academies, professions and public institutions to women, and her dissents prompted laws, such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, that made workplaces fairer. Just as importantly, she demonstrated a method, the patient, evidence-based building of legal change, that advocates around the world still study. She also became a rare popular symbol of the idea that justice, equality and rigorous intellect belong together, inspiring countless young women to enter law and public life. Her legacy is not free of controversy, but its central achievement endures: she helped write equality between the sexes into the fabric of the law.
Sources & further reading
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.