Meet Ruth Bader Ginsburg: She Argued Men to Free Women – Then Became the Court’s North Star

She was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader, Jewish immigrants from Austria and Poland. The family lived in a modest clapboard house on East 9th Street; her father ran a small fur store and her mother, who had left school at 15, saved secretly in a dresser drawer so Ruth could attend college. After Celia died of cervical cancer the day before Ruth’s high-school graduation, Ruth leaned on her mother’s lessons of self-reliance and quiet determination, graduating Cornell Phi Beta Kappa in 1954 and then tying for first in her Columbia Law School class in 1959.

In 1972 she helped launch the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, becoming its general counsel and arguing six landmark Supreme Court gender-discrimination cases between 1973 and 1978, winning five. By deliberately representing male plaintiffs such as Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife had died in childbirth and who was denied Social Security survivor benefits afforded to widowed mothers she showed male justices that sex-based rules harmed them too, a tactic now called the “Ginsburg method.” These victories built the constitutional scaffolding that would later support Title IX, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and same-sex marriage rulings.

After a short search, Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law” and sent her nomination to the Senate. The Judiciary Committee approved her 18-0; during floor debate even conservative Strom Thurmond praised her “unquestioned integrity.” She took the constitutional oath on 10 August 1993, becoming the 107th justice and only the second woman after Sandra Day O’Connor. Writing for the Court in U.S. v. Virginia (1996) she struck down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute, establishing that sex-based classifications must meet “exceedingly persuasive justification.” In Olmstead (1999) she held that unjustified institutional isolation of persons with disabilities is a form of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Both opinions are still the governing standard for sex and disability discrimination.

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007) she dissented from a 5-4 ruling that barred Lilly Ledbetter’s pay-discrimination claim; Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench and urged Congress to act. Congress responded in 2009 with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first bill signed into law by President Obama. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013) she warned that invalidating key Voting Rights Act provisions was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”; the dissent became a touchstone for subsequent voting-rights litigation.

Ginsburg became a pop-culture icon dubbed “The Notorious RBG,” spawning tattoos, workout books, and a 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary
After a 2013 New York University law student coined the meme, the nickname exploded online; Tumblr art, Saturday Night Live sketches, and Kate McKinnon’s “Gins-burn” rap followed. A 2015 biography became a bestseller, “I dissent” baby onesies sold out, and her personal trainer co-authored “The RBG Workout” in 2017. The CNN Films documentary “RBG” grossed $14 million and was nominated for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by family. Following Jewish tradition, her coffin was plain pine; she lay in repose at the Supreme Court steps for two days as thousands paid respects. On 25 September she became the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett only eight days after Ginsburg’s death; the Republican-led Senate confirmed her 52-48 on 26 October 2020, creating a 6-3 conservative super-majority. That new alignment provided the decisive votes to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) and to strike down race-conscious college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), outcomes legal scholars attribute directly to the shift Ginsburg’s death enabled.