Ruth Bader Ginsburg: supreme court justice known for activism and integrity

Champion of women's and civil rights died at the age of 87 after years-long battle with cancer

Mourners gather on the steps of the US Supreme Court in Washington DC after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 87, on September 18, 2020. EPA

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gestures to the attendees of her presentation at the National Book Festival presented by the Library of Congress at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington on August 31, 2019. EPA

The flag at the White House flies at half-mast on September 18, 2020 after the Supreme Court announced that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. AP Photo

Ruth Bader Ginsburg poses in her robe in her office at the US District Court in Washington on August 3, 1993 after the Senate voted 96-3 to confirm her appointment as the 107th justice and the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. AP Photo

A man holds a sign reading "RBG HERO" as mourners hold a vigil for Ruth Bader Ginsburg outside the US Supreme Court in Washington. Bloomberg

People gather under a mural of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the U Street neighbourhood in Washington after the announcement of her death. AP Photo

Ruth Bader Ginsburg types while on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in Italy in 1977. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader in 1948. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader Ginsburg poses with her family at the Supreme Court in Washington. From left are, son-in-law George Spera, daughter Jane Ginsburg, husband Martin, son James Ginsburg. The judge's grandchildren Clara Spera and Paul Spera are in front. AP Photo

Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her husband Martin and their daughter Jane in 1958. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader's engagement photograph, while a senior at Cornell University in December 1953. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband Martin. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's daughter Jane, born in 1955 and son James, born in 1965, pose for a photo. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Joan Ruth Bader at two years old in 1935. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her husband Martin Ginsburg, and their children Jane and James off the coast of St Thomas in 1979. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via AP

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows the many different collars she wore with her robes, in her chambers at the Supreme Court building in Washington on June 17, 2016. Reuters

US Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, at the Supreme Court building on June 1, 2017. Reuters

Ruth Bader Ginsburgh holds up a drawing of herself with the words "My Grandmother Is Very Special by Paul Spera" as she appears before the Senate Judicary Committee July 20, 1993, the first day of her confirmation hearings for the post of Supreme Court Justice. Paul is Ginsburg's grandson. Reuters

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US President Bill Clinton's first Supreme Court nominee, is greeted by the first two women to serve on the Senate Judicary Committee, Dianne Feinstein and Carol Moseley-Braun, on July 20, 1993, before the opening of her confirmation hearings. Reuters

Ruth Bader Ginsburg gets a hug from President Barack Obama as he arrives for his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009. Reuters

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attends the lunch session of The Women's Conference in Long Beach, California on October 26, 2010. Reuters

President Bill Clinton applauds as Ruth Bader Ginsburg prepares to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House, after the president announced he would nominate her to the Supreme Court on June 14, 1993. AP Photo

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shakes hands with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G Breyer before President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address. AFP

The first female US Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, speaks as fellow Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg listens during a forum at the Newseum in Washington on April 11, 2012, to mark the 30th anniversary of O'Connor's first term on the Supreme Court. Reuters

President Bill Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg walk along the Colonnade of the White House in Washington, as they head to the Rose Garden for a news conference where the resident nominated Ginsburg to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. AP Photo

Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands during the national anthem at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalisation ceremony at the New York Historical Society Museum and Library in Manhattan, New York on April 10, 2017. Reuters

US President George W Bush's nominee to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Judge John Roberts, walks past Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the steps of the court in Washington on September 6, 2005. AFP

US Supreme Court judges Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and the US Ambassador in Paris Howard Leach stand with French President Jacques Chirac at him at the Elysee Palace on July 8, 2003. AFP

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg moved slowly.

When court was in session, she often had her head down, sometimes leading visitors to think she was asleep. She once acknowledged that she did occasionally nod off. She once confessed to dozing during a State of the Union address.

But it was a mistake to equate her gait and gaze with frailty, for Ginsburg showed over and over a steely resilience in the face of personal loss and serious health problems that made the diminutive New Yorker a towering women’s rights champion and forceful presence at the court over 27 years.

She made few concessions to age and recurrent health problems, working regularly with a personal trainer. She never missed any time in court before the age of 85, and then only following surgery in December 2018 for lung cancer.

Ginsburg died Friday of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer at her home in Washington at the age of 87.

Late in her court tenure, she became a social media icon, the Notorious RBG, a name coined by a law student who admired Ginsburg’s dissent in a case cutting back on a key civil rights law.

The justice was at first taken aback. There was nothing “notorious” about this woman of rectitude who wore a variety of lace collars on the bench and often appeared in public in elegant gloves.

But when her law clerks and grandchildren explained the connection to another Brooklynite, the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., her skepticism turned to delight. “In the word the current generation uses, it’s awesome,” Ginsburg said in 2016, shortly before she turned 83.

In 2018, Ginsburg was the subject of a documentary and a feature film On the Basis of Sex, in which the actor Felicity Jones portrayed her.

In her final years on the court, Ginsburg was the unquestioned leader of the liberal justices, as outspoken in dissent as she was cautious in earlier years.

Criticising the court’s conservative majority for getting rid of a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 2013, Ginsburg wrote that it was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”.

Her stature on the court and the death of her husband in 2010 probably contributed to Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the bench beyond the goal she initially set for herself, to match Justice Louis Brandeis’ 22 years on the court and his retirement at the age of 82.

Appearing at a law school forum in 2008, she noted with relief that there was no retirement age for US judges. “We hold our offices during good behaviour,” Ginsburg said, citing language from the Constitution. “So all of my colleagues behave very well.”

Ginsburg had special affection for Brandeis, the first Jew named to the high court. She was the court’s second woman and its sixth Jewish justice. In time she was joined by two other Jews, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, and two other women, Ms Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Both developments were perhaps unthinkable when Ginsburg graduated from law school in 1959 and faced the triple bogey of looking for work as a woman, a mother and a Jew.

Forty years later, she noted that religion had become irrelevant in the selection of high-court justices and that gender was heading in the same direction, although when asked how many women would be enough for the high court, Ginsburg replied without hesitation, “Nine."

She could take some credit for equality of the sexes in the law. In the 1970s, she argued six key cases before the court when she was an architect of the women’s rights movement. She won five.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books,” President Bill Clinton said in 1993 when he announced her appointment. “She has already done that.”

Her time as a justice was marked by triumphs for equality for women, as in her opinion for the court ordering the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its state funding.

There were setbacks, too. She dissented forcefully from the court’s decision in 2007 to uphold a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. The “alarming” ruling, Ginsburg said, “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives”.

Ginsburg first gained fame as a litigator for the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She had worked on the legal team that persuaded the high court to rule for the first time ever in 1970 that a state had violated the Constitution by denying women equal treatment.

Ginsburg once said that she had not entered the law as a champion of equal rights. “I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other,” she wrote. “I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyse problems clearly.”

Besides civil rights, Ginsburg took an interest in capital punishment, voting repeatedly to limit its use. During her tenure, the court declared it unconstitutional for states to execute the intellectually disabled and killers younger than 18.

At argument sessions in the ornate courtroom, she was known for digging deep into case records and for being a stickler for following the rules.

She voted most often with the other liberal-leaning justices, fellow Clinton appointee Breyer and two Republican appointees, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, then later with President Barack Obama’s two appointees, Ms Sotomayor and Ms Kagan.

In the most divisive of cases, Ginsburg was often at odds with the court’s more conservative members. Yet she was personally closest on the court to Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite.

She once explained that she took Scalia’s sometimes biting dissents as a challenge to be met. “How am I going to answer this in a way that’s a real putdown?” she said. Scalia died in 2016.

As for her own dissents, Ginsburg said that some were aimed at swaying the opinions of her fellow judges while others were “an appeal to the intelligence of another day” in the hopes that they would provide guidance to future courts.

“Hope springs eternal,” she said in 2007, “and when I am writing a dissent, I’m always hoping for that fifth or sixth vote — even though I’m disappointed more often than not.”

Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933, the second daughter in a middle-class family. Her older sister, who gave her the lifelong nickname “Kiki”, died at age 6, so Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section as an only child. Her dream, she has said, was to be an opera singer.

Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the night before Ginsburg, then 17, was to graduate from high school. Celia Bader never attended college but worked as a bookkeeper. In a public television documentary about Jewish Americans, Ginsburg said, “What’s the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s Garment District and a US Supreme Court justice? One generation."

She married her husband, Martin, in 1954, the year she graduated from Cornell University. She attended Harvard University’s law school but transferred to Columbia University when her husband took a law job in New York.

Ginsburg had graduated at the top of her Columbia Law School class but could not find a law firm willing to hire her. She later said she had had more than her share of “mazel” — the Hebrew word for luck — to help her along in life.

“Suppose there had been a Wall Street firm interested in hiring me? What would I be today?” she intoned in 2007. “A retired partner.”

Martin Ginsburg went on to become a prominent tax lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. Ginsburg was a law professor at Rutgers University and Columbia, then later a federal appeals court judge for 13 years. Theirs was an equal partnership in which Martin Ginsburg was the undisputed master of the kitchen, often baking cakes for the justices’ birthdays.

In 1999, Ginsburg had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. She had surgery again in 2009 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in December 2018 to remove cancerous growths on her left lung.

In 2019, doctors treated Ginsburg with radiation for a tumour on her pancreas. She maintained an active schedule even during the three weeks of radiation. When she revealed a recurrence of her cancer in July this year, this time with lesions on her liver that were treated with chemotherapy every two weeks, Ginsburg said she remained “fully able” to continue as a justice.

Her determination was perhaps most evident on the day the court met for the final time in June 2010. Her husband had died a day earlier, and her children told her their father would want her to go to work. The justices filed into the courtroom that Monday, and Ginsburg was there.

She is survived by her two children, Jane and James, and several grandchildren.