Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life.
BY: MARY WILSON
Opinions Editor
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Sept. 18 from complications of metastatic cancer of the pancreas, the Supreme Court reported. It was the fourth time she had battled cancer. She was 87.
Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, and managed to achieve a rock-star following in recent years. Eventually she reached first-name status, allowing everyday people to refer to her simply as ‘RBG.’
In the past few years there have been several movies and documentaries about her life. She traveled cross country on speaking tours. She was so famous that she even had a StubHub page where people could track where her next speaking engagement was. However, her rise to fame was slow.
“She was a hero and a warrior for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights,” said Meramec English Professor Maxine Beach. “She was a warrior and went to law school when women did not do that.”
The life of RBG
In an interview, Ginsburg once said that “for most girls growing up in the ‘40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.”
“Ginsburg was brilliant, as we all know, and was not going to be satisfied with being a housewife,” Beach said. “She wanted to use that brilliant mind of hers and put it to good work.”
Ginsburg met her husband, Martin (Marty) Ginsburg at college, and got married after she graduated.
Even though Ginsburg would eventually be known as a ‘champion of gender rights,’ she didn’t start out to be a lawyer for women’s rights. She is quoted as saying that she attended law school “for personal, selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other. I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly.”
As a law student at Harvard—one of only nine female students in the school—she made the law review in 1957, according to the American Civil Liberties Union website.
When Mr. Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer, Ginsburg went to all his classes for law school, took notes, took care of their three-year-old daughter, wrote down his senior class paper as Mr. Ginsburg dictated it to her, and then, when the rest of her family was asleep, would read the textbooks necessary for the next day of classes.
Later on, in a 1993 interview with NPR, Mr. Ginsburg said of his time battling cancer: “So that left Ruth with a 3 year old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me.”
Ginsburg graduated from the Columbia Law School, where she tied for first in her class. She was recommended by a Harvard Law professor for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. However, Frankfurter said that he wasn’t ready to hire a woman.
After graduation from law school, according to the ACLU website, she did not get a job offer from any of the 12 firms she interviewed with. Just two firms gave her a follow up interview.
From 1959 to 1961 Ginsburg worked as a clerk for Judge Palmieri, the ACLU reports. She only got the job because her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, promised Judge Palmieri that “if she couldn’t do the work, he would provide someone who could.” NPR reported that Gunther “regularly fed his best students to Palmieri” and said that if Palmieri didn’t hire Ginsburg, Gunther would quit sending him students.
Palmieri kept Ginsburg on for two years. Most of his clerks only stayed for one.
After she finished, she received offers from law firms. Instead, Ginsburg worked with Columbia Law School’s International Procedure Project instead. She co-authored a book on Sweden’s legal system and she translated Sweden’s Judicial Code into English.
When, as a faculty member at Rutgers, she learned she was being paid less than her male colleagues, she joined an “equal pay campaign,” according to the ACLU. The campaign resulted in “substantial increases for all the complainants.”
She hid her second pregnancy at Rutgers by wearing her mother in law’s clothes, NPR reported. Because of this, her contract was renewed before she gave birth.
Ginsburg, moved by her own experiences with discrimination, began to handle sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the ACLU. Ginsburg thought that men and women would “create new traditions by their actions, if artificial barriers are removed, and avenues of opportunity held open to them.”
In 1972, Ginsburg helped start the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Also in 1972, she was the first woman to ever be granted tenure at Columbia Law School.
She wrote her first Supreme Court brief in 1971. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed in the case Reed v. Reed. Sally Reed thought she “should be the executor of her son’s estate, instead of her ex husband,” NPR reported.
According to oyez.org, a site devoted to the Supreme Court, the Idaho Probate code “specified that ‘males must be preferred to females’ in appointing administrators of estates.” After their son died, Cecil Reed, Sally’s ex husband, was “appointed administrator.”
Sally Reed challenged the law in court.
Ginsburg asked the Supreme Court this question: “Did the Idaho Probate Code violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?”
The all-male Supreme Court unanimously agreed. “To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other….is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment….The choice in this context may not lawfully be mandated solely on the basis of sex.”
NPR reports that Reed v. Reed “was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.”
What happens now?
The Supreme Court typically has nine members. According to Meramec political science professor, John Messmer, the standard process for confirming a new Supreme Court Justice starts with the sitting President formally submitting “a nominee, and the Senate then has the opportunity to confirm or deny [the nominee.]”
“The way it should work…is that when there’s a nominee, there’s a process that’s very similar to the legislative process,” Messmer said. He continued, “It starts off really slow, where it goes to a committee where members of a committee deal with this issue. And the issue in this case isn’t a bill, it’s a person.”
Messmer noted that “when it comes to strictly the Constitution, the Constitution just simply says: (the) president nominates (and) the senate confirms.”
Things get muddled in election years. In 2016, during the final year of President Obama’s last term, Justice Antonin Scalia died. At the time, Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, said that the Senate should not confirm a new Justice until after the election.
Justice Scalia died almost nine months before the election. McConnell made this announcement just hours after news broke of Scalia’s death. Senate Republicans refused to vote on President Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland.
“Mitch McConnell and the Republican party got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees,” Messmer pointed out.
However, with just weeks until the presidential election– in fact, some people have already cast mail-in ballots– Senate Republicans and Mitch McConnell are vowing to vote and confirm Mr. Trump’s nominee, even though just four years ago senate Republicans insisted that the voters should have a voice in who the next Supreme Court Justice is.
“It’s legal, it’s constitutional,” Messmer said. “But it is so unethical.”
Mr. Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is a favorite of social conservatives. If confirmed, there will be six conservative justices. This has the potential to overturn monumental laws and cases, like ‘Roe v. Wade,’ which made abortion a constitutional right, and the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to have access to health insurance. In 2015, NPR reported that Barrett signed an “anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage letter from Catholic women.”
This has worried many women’s and LGBTQ rights groups.
“We should not be resigned to just go ‘oh well, we’re doomed’, because that is going to doom us. She [Ginsburg] would want us to keep fighting. And so if someone cares about her, respects her, that’s what they’ll do,” said Beach.
Messmer added that “you don’t have to be a woman or be anywhere aligned with her ideologically or politically, to admire what she went through.” He continued, “the one thing all humans have in common is that we have to deal with hurdles. And most of the time…hurdles are designed to keep you from doing what you want to accomplish. She [Ginsburg] had a ton of hurdles in front of her and she didn’t allow that to stop her.”
Ginsburg was also committed to progress.
“We have made so much progress, and it doesn’t look good right now. It looks a little scary right now with what’s going on in the White House and in the world at large, but it’s been scary before, and people fight back, and people keep going…. we wouldn’t have the change we have now if it weren’t for people like Ginsburg. We wouldn’t have marriage equality for gay people, we wouldn’t have women’s equality in the workplace,” Beach said.
According to Messmer, Ginsburg fought for the “little guy.”
“Once she [Ginsburg] was in a position of power where her opinion and interpretation of the law and the constitution could be used to promote equal protection… that was the essence of her tenure on the Supreme Court… always fighting for the little guy… the little guy that’s discriminated against. They’ll be talking about her a hundred years from now. And that’s pretty impressive,” Messmer added.
Beach agrees.
“If I can just be a little bit like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even a portion of the woman she was, I’m happy,” said Beach.
