US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at age 87

Champion of women’s rights dies at home after 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

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a trailblazing feminist icon and a steadfast liberal voice on the United States Supreme Court since the early 1990s, died on Friday aged 87 after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Known to her legion of fans as RBG, Ginsburg was lauded for her decades-long commitment to justice and women’s rights, drawing praise from across the political divide, including from President Donald Trump, who dubbed her a “titan” with a “brilliant mind”.

Such non-partisan displays may be short-lived. Ginsburg leaves behind a vacant seat on a key judicial body in a high-stakes election year, offering Mr Trump the chance to expand the court’s conservative majority with a rare third appointment in his four-year presidential term.

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” the court’s Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement.

“We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Within hours of the court’s statement, crowds gathered outside the elegant marble edifice in Washington to pay their respects, lighting candles, waving rainbow flags for sexual and gender rights and chanting "RBG".

Ginsburg was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933. She rose from her working-class background and fought sexism and stereotypes to study at a male-dominated Harvard Law School.

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg struggled to get work upon graduation — which she attributed to being “Jewish, a woman and a mother”. She took several law jobs in the 1960s and in 1972 founded the women’s rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and became Columbia Law School’s first tenured woman professor.

Anthony Romero, ACLU’s executive director, lauded Ginsburg’s legal activism in the early 1970s, when she led more than 300 workplace suits that “established the foundation for the current legal prohibitions against sex discrimination” in the US.

“She leaves a country changed because of her life’s work,” he said.

Ginsburg joined the Washington DC court of appeals under the Carter administration in 1980. In 1993, then US president Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court – the second woman ever named to the body after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

There, the 1.5m-tall lawyer played an outsize role in shaping policies on hot-button issues with progressive votes in landmark rulings on rights for women, gays, minorities and on safeguarding access to abortions and preserving the Obamacare healthcare law.

Over a six-decade legal career, Ginsburg achieved unlikely celebrity status for a jurist. She was admired for her sharp legal instincts, her withering put-downs and – for those on the left – her progressive votes on divisive social issues.

In recent years, she became a cult figure among #MeToo-era feminists for her decades-long crusade for women's rights. In the 2018 documentary about her, RBG, she said: "I ask no favour for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."

Ginsburg suffered from bouts of cancer from the late 1990s and grew increasingly frail. Democrats had long feared that her death could tip the balance of the nine-member court, which already had a 5-4 conservative majority, further to the right.

According to the court, Ginsburg, a widowed mother-of-two, died on Friday evening from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer surrounded by her family at her home. She will be buried in a private ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

She was praised by several former presidents. Jimmy Carter called her a “beacon of justice”; George W Bush said she had "inspired more than one generation of women and girls"; Barack Obama called her a “relentless litigator and an incisive jurist”.

“Justice Ginsburg helped us see that discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t about an abstract ideal of equality; that it doesn’t only harm women; that it has real consequences for all of us,” Mr Obama said in a statement.

But as the epitaphs were being emailed to journalists, US politicians quickly became embroiled in a debate over who would fill the court's empty seat – a job-for-life on a powerful body that both main parties seek to stack with political bedfellows.

Mr Trump, who seeks re-election on November 3, has already appointed two conservatives to the court. Supreme Court placements require confirmation by the Senate, where Mr Trump’s fellow Republicans have 53 of the chamber’s 100 seats.

There has been bad blood between the main parties over appointments since 2016, when the Republican-held Senate blocked Democratic President Barack Obama’s nomination of a moderate court judge in an election year.

Mr Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, said that Ginsburg should not be replaced until after the coming election, telling reporters: “The voters should pick the president and the president should pick the justice for the Senate to consider.”

Prior to her death, Ginsburg even weighed in on her own succession. According to a National Public Radio report, she wrote in a statement to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”