The Notorious RBG

By: Aambar Agarwal

Last Friday, September 18, we lost a powerful human being. We lost a champion of women’s rights. A cancer survivor. A Supreme Court justice. A changemaker. A trailblazer. A trendsetter. A mother.

Her name was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She began making history in Harvard Law School as a part of nine women in a class of 552 students. Despite being barred from ‘male-only’ libraries and forced to justify her place at Harvard, Ginsberg served as the first female member of the editorial staff for the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

During her final year in law school, she transferred to Columbia to be able to stay close to her spouse and went on to graduate in 1959 as valedictorian. Afterwards, however, Ginsberg had a tough time landing a job, even with these grand accomplishments, because she was a woman.

A few years later, she studied and wrote a book on Swedish civil procedure as a part of one of Columbia’s projects. To this date, her book remains a leading work in the field. She then taught for nine years at the Rutgers School of Law. Nevertheless, like before, she encountered discrimination: this time, in pay.

In the 1970s, Ginsberg finally began her career in fighting for gender equality. With the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1971, she won her first Supreme Court case: Reed v. Reed. The case centered around an Idaho law that preferred men over women in choosing who would oversee the assets of those who died without a will. To challenge it, she drafted an 88-page brief on all the ways law reinforced society’s oppression of women. Her work led to the Supreme Court striking down the state law as unconstitutional on the basis of the equal protection clause.

When the ACLU created the Women’s Rights Project in 1972, Ginsberg was hired as the director. Under this project, she argued before the Supreme Court six times, winning all but one, and contributed to countless briefs on gender discrimination. Her strategy was ingenious; rather than only focusing on cases detailing discrimination against women, she also argued against the disparate treatment of men. She sought to free everyone from their gender constraints; she sought to truly make the genders equal before the law. And during all this, she even became the first permanent female professor at Columbia Law School.

In 1980, Ginsberg was appointed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter. Here, she developed her reputation as a pragmatic and observant liberal justice.

The pinnacle of her career occurred in 1993, when President Clinton chose Ginsberg as the new Supreme Court justice. She became the second female Supreme Court justice ever in US history.

During her 27-year tenure, she continued to fight for equality. When the court upheld a law criminalizing a procedure used to terminate second-trimester pregnancies, rationalizing that they were protecting women from regret, Ginsberg dissented. When the court allowed a company to practice wage discrimination between the sexes, Ginsberg dissented and got the decision overturned. When the court abolished the Voting Rights Act of 1965, thus allowing for Southern states to change voting procedures without federal permission, Ginsberg dissented. When the court argued over the Defense of Marriage Act, which only protected marriage between a man and woman, Ginsberg dissented and asserted that it created a “full marriage” for opposite-sex couples, “and then this sort of skim milk marriage” for others.

Until her final breath, Ruth Bader Ginsberg fought ceaselessly for equality regardless of sex, gender, race, and sexual orientation. With her flamboyant collars, oversized glasses, and chunky jewelry, she was always ready to challenge our oppressors and bring about change. She was always ready to fight for what was right.

So, thank you, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for bringing us closer to a more perfect union. Thank you for paving the way for women like me.

Rest in power.

More readings:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-dead.html

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/9/18/18253896/ruth-bader-ginsburg-style-size