Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She is the second female justice and the first Jewish female justice.
Ginsburg graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University in 1954. In 1956 she enrolled at Harvard Law School, she was one of nine women in a class of 500 and encountered a very male-dominated, hostile environment. The women were criticised by the law school’s dean for taking the places of qualified males but Ginsburg excelled academically. She transferred to Columbia Law School when her husband Martin D. Ginsburg took a job in New York City and became the first woman to be on two major law reviews, the Harvard Law Review (where she was the first female member) and the Columbia Law Review. She earned her Bachelor of Laws at Columbia in 1959 and tied for first in her class.
Ginsburg’s gender held her back despite her outstanding academic record, in 1960 she was provided with a strong recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School but Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter turned her down for a clerkship position because she was a woman. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri from 1959 – 1961 when she became a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She learnt Swedish to enable her to co-author a book with Anders Bruzelius on civil procedure in Sweden.
Ginsburg taught at Rutgers University Law School for 9 years before becoming the first female tenured professor at Columbia University where she co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination. In 1970 she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women’s rights, she also served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1980 Ginsburg was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter where she served until 1993 when President Bill Clinton appointed her to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ginsburg presents a strong, liberal voice. She works to make advances in gender equality, the rights of workers and the separation of church and state. In 1996 she wrote the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Virginia, which held that the state-supported Virginia Military Institute could not refuse to admit women. In 1999 she won the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for her contributions to gender equality and civil rights.
In 2015 Ginsburg was influential in the ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges which made same sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Ginsburg had shown public support for the idea for years, officiating same-sex marriages and consistently challenging arguments against it.
Ginsburg was named among the 100 Most Powerful Women in 2009 and in 2015 she was named by Time Magazine as one of the Time 100, as an Icon. She has become a pop culture icon, being referred to as “Notorious R.B.G.”. She is outspoken in her views, making headlines in 2014 for chastising her male colleagues for having a “blind spot” on women’s issues. At 82 she has no plans to retire, claiming that she will attempt to match Justice Stevens, who retired after nearly 35 years on the bench at age 90.