Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent twenty-seven years on the Supreme Court of the United States, but the work that changed American law most directly happened before she ever put on a robe. During the 1970s she ran a deliberate, patient litigation campaign that persuaded an all-male Court to treat sex discrimination as a constitutional problem rather than a social custom. By the time she joined the bench in 1993, much of the legal architecture she had argued for was already in place.
That creates a tension worth understanding. The advocate was ambitious and strategic. The Justice was cautious, incremental, and often in the minority on the questions that made her famous outside the legal profession. This biography follows both careers, verifies the family and biographical details readers search for most, and is careful throughout to say exactly what she did in each case: argued it, wrote the opinion, joined someone else’s opinion, or dissented.
Who Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was the second woman and the first Jewish woman to sit on the Court. Before her appointment she was a law professor and the founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, where she argued six cases before the Supreme Court and won five.
Her name is attached to two distinct bodies of work. The first is the sequence of 1970s equal protection cases that established that government cannot hand out benefits, obligations or opportunities on the basis of sex without a strong justification. The second is a set of Supreme Court opinions written between 1993 and 2020, including the majority in United States v. Virginia and dissents in Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Shelby County v. Holder that became more widely read than most majority opinions of the same era.
Quick facts
| Detail | Verified information |
|---|---|
| Full name at birth | Joan Ruth Bader |
| Born | March 15, 1933, Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | September 18, 2020, Washington, D.C. |
| Age at death | 87 |
| Cause of death | Complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer |
| Parents | Nathan Bader and Celia Amster Bader |
| Husband | Martin David Ginsburg, married 1954; he died in 2010 |
| Children | Jane Carol Ginsburg and James Steven Ginsburg |
| Education | Cornell University, A.B., 1954; Harvard Law School (attended); Columbia Law School, LL.B., 1959 |
| Teaching | Rutgers Law School, 1963–1972; Columbia Law School, 1972–1980 |
| Advocacy | ACLU, 1972–1980; Women’s Rights Project counsel; ACLU general counsel, 1973–1980 |
| First federal appointment | U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit; nominated by Jimmy Carter April 14, 1980; confirmed June 18, 1980 |
| Supreme Court appointment | Nominated by Bill Clinton June 22, 1993; confirmed by the Senate 96–3 on August 3, 1993; took the judicial oath August 10, 1993 |
| Length of Supreme Court service | 27 years |
| Buried | Arlington National Cemetery, beside her husband |
| Principal legal field | Constitutional equal protection, particularly sex-based classification |
Source for appointment and service dates: Federal Judicial Center biographical directory.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Young: Childhood, Parents and Early Influences
She was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood. The family called her Kiki. She began using her middle name at school, where several classmates were also named Joan.
Her father, Nathan Bader, arrived in the United States from Russia at thirteen and worked as a furrier and later in a men’s clothing store. Her mother, Celia Amster Bader, was born in New York a few months after her own parents emigrated from a town near Kraków. Neither parent had the money to attend college. The family was not strictly observant but belonged to the East Midwood Jewish Center, and Ginsburg described herself throughout her life as a Jewish American conscious of what that identity had cost her grandparents’ generation.
She later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she remembered, as a child, passing a Pennsylvania resort displaying a sign reading “No dogs or Jews allowed.” She cited that memory when a senator asked whether her work on sex discrimination had made her alert to racial discrimination. It is one of the few documented links she herself drew between her Jewish upbringing and her legal outlook, which is why it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing.
Her mother’s influence
Celia Bader is the one early influence Ginsburg named repeatedly and on the record. The two visited the public library together, and Celia saved money toward a college education she had not been able to pursue herself. The instruction Ginsburg reported receiving from her was practical rather than political: be independent, and do the work well enough that the result speaks before you do.
Celia developed cancer while Ginsburg was in high school and died the day before her daughter’s graduation from James Madison High School, where Ginsburg had been scheduled to speak. Ginsburg was seventeen. In her 1993 Rose Garden remarks accepting the Supreme Court nomination, she described her mother as the bravest person she had known and expressed the hope that she could become what her mother might have been in a generation that let daughters aspire.
That is the honest version of the story. The retrospective version, common in short biographies, treats a grieving teenager as already planning a constitutional litigation campaign. There is no evidence for that. What the record supports is narrower and more interesting: Ginsburg grew up watching an intelligent woman with no outlet for her intelligence, and she spent much of her professional life on laws that produced exactly that result.
An early sign of the writer she became
At James Madison High School she edited the student newspaper and wrote about the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. She also lost a piece of a tooth twirling a baton for the school pep club. Both details are documented, and together they describe a fairly ordinary Brooklyn adolescence rather than a destiny.
The family also absorbed an early loss: Ginsburg’s only sibling, an older sister, died in childhood. Ginsburg rarely discussed it publicly, and this biography does not speculate about its effect on her.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Education: Cornell, Harvard and Columbia
She earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University in 1954, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School in 1959, where she tied for first in her graduating class.
Those three institutions are the easy part of the answer. The useful part is what the experience cost her, and what it taught her about how discrimination actually operates.
Cornell, and the professor who pointed her toward law
At Cornell she studied government and worked as a research assistant for Professor Robert E. Cushman. This was the McCarthy period, and Cushman introduced her to lawyers who were defending people accused of disloyalty. The appeal, as she described it later, was that law offered a living and a way to defend values she cared about at the same time. She graduated with high honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
She also credited the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who taught at Cornell, with shaping how she wrote. Anyone who has read her opinions will recognize the result: short sentences, concrete nouns, and very little ornament.
Harvard Law School, one of nine women
Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956 as one of roughly nine women in a class of about five hundred. The obstacles were not subtle. Dean Erwin Griswold hosted a dinner at which the women students were asked to justify occupying seats that could have gone to men. A periodicals room in the Lamont Library was closed to women, which left her unable to retrieve a journal she needed for a law review assignment.
She was also carrying more than her classmates. Her daughter Jane was already a toddler. During her second year, her husband Martin was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery and radiation while still enrolled. Ginsburg attended his classes, typed his papers, kept up her own coursework, and was elected to the Harvard Law Review.
The transfer to Columbia, and the degree Harvard did not give her
When Martin graduated in 1958 and took a position at a New York firm, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School for her final year. She joined the Columbia Law Review as well, making her one of very few people to have served on both. She graduated in 1959 tied for first in her class.
Harvard declined to award her a degree for a program she had largely completed there. Years later, after she had become prominent, Harvard offered her one on the condition that she surrender the Columbia degree. She refused.
Why her education mattered more than her transcript
Here is the part that gets left out of most biographies. Ginsburg finished at the very top of a Columbia class in 1959 and still could not get hired.
Her Harvard professors recommended her for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who would not take a woman. No New York law firm offered her a position. She later identified the combination that made her unhirable in that market: being a woman, being Jewish, and being a mother. She eventually clerked for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the Southern District of New York from 1959 to 1961, and only after Professor Gerald Gunther pressed Palmieri personally and arranged for a male student to stand by as a replacement if she did not work out.
That sequence matters because it explains her later legal strategy. She had experienced discrimination that nobody involved considered malicious. Firms were not refusing her out of hostility; they were following assumptions about what women did. When she later argued that a statute could be unconstitutional even when it was framed as a protection, she was describing something she had lived through.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Husband: Her Marriage to Martin D. Ginsburg
Martin David Ginsburg (1932–2010) was one of the country’s leading tax lawyers and a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center. The couple met at Cornell, married in June 1954, and were together for fifty-six years until his death.
Marty Ginsburg was of counsel at the firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson and taught at Columbia, New York University and Georgetown. He was prominent enough in his own field that tax practitioners knew his name long before most Americans knew his wife’s. The Supreme Court’s statement on his death noted that when she was appointed to the D.C. Circuit in 1980, he joined the Georgetown faculty so the family could move to Washington. That is the clearest single piece of evidence about how their careers were arranged.
What the partnership actually looked like
There is a sentimental version of this marriage and a factual one. The factual one is more impressive.
When Marty was diagnosed with cancer during his third year at Harvard Law School, Ginsburg attended his classes, collected notes for him, typed his final paper, and kept up her own work on the Harvard Law Review while caring for a toddler. He recovered and graduated on schedule.
The support ran the other way as well, and it was concrete rather than symbolic. He did the family cooking, a division of labor the family discussed openly and which later became part of her public image. He also used his standing in Washington legal circles to campaign for her nomination to the Supreme Court in 1993, making calls and gathering endorsements on her behalf.
Their first professional collaboration was legal, not domestic. In the early 1970s Marty brought his wife a tax case, Moritz v. Commissioner, involving a never-married man denied a caregiver deduction available to women. They argued it together before the Tenth Circuit and won. It became the template for the strategy she used for the rest of the decade: find a male plaintiff harmed by a sex-based rule, and let the judges see the arbitrariness without having to identify with a female litigant first.
He died on June 27, 2010, of complications of metastatic cancer. Ginsburg returned to the bench and announced an opinion the following day.
The cost, stated plainly
Two demanding legal careers, two children, repeated illness and a cross-country move are not a romance. Ginsburg was frank that the arrangement worked partly because of circumstances many people do not have: a spouse who outearned her and was secure enough not to mind, help at home, and an academic schedule more flexible than a firm partnership. Presenting their marriage as proof that anyone can balance both would misread the record.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Family: Children and Personal Life
The Ginsburgs had two children. Jane Carol Ginsburg, born in 1955, is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading authority on copyright and literary property law. She and her mother became the first mother and daughter to hold appointments on the same American law faculty. James Steven Ginsburg, born in 1965, left law school to found Cedille Records, a nonprofit classical label in Chicago whose recordings have won Grammy Awards.
Ginsburg was survived by four grandchildren at her death, according to the Supreme Court’s announcement. One of them, Clara Spera, was a lawyer and was with her in her final days.
Two details about her children belong in a legal biography rather than a celebrity profile. Jane was born in 1955, between her mother’s time in Oklahoma and her entry to Harvard Law School, and Ginsburg has said the experience of being demoted at a Social Security office in Lawton after disclosing the pregnancy was her first direct encounter with employment discrimination. James was born in 1965 while she taught at Rutgers, where she concealed the pregnancy under borrowed clothing because she feared losing her contract. Those two episodes appear in her own accounts of why she took up sex-discrimination work, and they are the reason this section exists at all.
Beyond that, the family’s privacy is theirs. This biography does not speculate about relationships, health, or household matters that the family has not discussed publicly.
How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Built Her Legal Career
She did not set out to become a civil rights litigator. She became one because sex-discrimination complaints kept landing on her desk and nobody else wanted them.
Rutgers, Sweden, and an unlikely detour
After her clerkship, Ginsburg joined the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure from 1961 to 1963. The assignment sent her to Sweden to co-author a book on Swedish civil procedure, for which she learned the language and later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund.
The detour matters more than it sounds. Sweden in the early 1960s had a public argument underway about whether women could be full participants in working life, and Ginsburg was watching it while American law still treated the question as settled. She returned to a country where separate help-wanted columns for men and women were normal.
She joined the Rutgers Law School faculty in 1963 and taught there until 1972, in the period when she was also asked to take on her first ACLU referrals in New Jersey. She was candid about why the cases came to her: sex discrimination was considered women’s work.
Reed v. Reed and the brief that started a campaign
In 1971 the Supreme Court decided Reed v. Reed, striking down an Idaho statute that automatically preferred men over women as administrators of estates. It was the first time the Court held that a sex-based classification violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Ginsburg did not argue Reed. She was the principal author of the brief. She also listed two older lawyers, Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray, as co-authors in recognition of arguments they had developed years earlier — a deliberate act of attribution that is worth noting in an era when such credit was rarely given.
The ACLU Women’s Rights Project
After Reed, the ACLU created the Women’s Rights Project, and Ginsburg became its founding director in 1972, co-directing with Brenda Feigen. She served as the organization’s general counsel from 1973 to 1980 and sat on its national board. The same year, Columbia Law School made her its first tenured woman professor.
The scale of the operation is usually understated. By 1974, the Project and ACLU affiliates had taken part in more than 300 sex-discrimination cases, and between 1969 and 1980 the ACLU participated in roughly two-thirds of the gender discrimination cases the Supreme Court decided. Ginsburg chose the ACLU deliberately over a narrower women’s organization, reasoning that it would lend the cause broader credibility and keep women’s rights connected to civil liberties generally.
The strategy, explained
Ginsburg wanted the Court to treat sex like race: a “suspect classification” triggering the toughest level of judicial review, called strict scrutiny. The Court never went that far, and still has not. But she got most of the way there by doing something counterintuitive.
She picked male plaintiffs.
The logic was practical. The judges she faced were men who believed sex-based laws protected women. Telling them otherwise invited resistance. Showing them a widower denied the survivor’s benefits a widow would have received made the arbitrariness visible without asking anyone to admit a prejudice. She described her chosen cases as those ripe for incremental change, presented in sequence — one modest step at a time, each one making the next one easier.
She also wrote the first American law school casebook on sex-based discrimination, which mattered because it gave the next generation of lawyers a teachable framework rather than scattered precedents.
What Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg Fight For?
She fought for the principle that government may not assign rights, benefits or burdens on the basis of sex, and that laws written to protect women frequently trapped them instead.
The constitutional vehicle was the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires states to treat similarly situated people alike. The Supreme Court had read it to cover racial classifications. Ginsburg’s project was to establish that it covered sex as well.
Why men appear so often in her cases
This confuses people, so it is worth stating plainly. Ginsburg’s clients included a widower denied childcare benefits, a widower denied Social Security benefits, a never-married man denied a caregiver deduction, and a man convicted of murder by a jury that excluded women by design. None of these were stunts. A law that says women need protection necessarily says men do not deserve it, and both halves of that sentence are the same constitutional defect.
The practical result is that her work expanded benefits for men as well as women. Fathers can receive survivor benefits. Widowers receive the same treatment as widows. Those outcomes are often omitted from summaries of her career, which tends to make her look like an advocate for one group rather than a lawyer attacking a category of reasoning.
What she did not claim
Ginsburg argued that laws should not use sex as a proxy for ability or need. That is a narrower claim than “every policy question about men and women has an obvious answer,” and she never made the broader one. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment and said repeatedly that she would have preferred an explicit constitutional guarantee to a judicially constructed one. She also accepted that some distinctions survive review — the question was always whether the government could justify them, not whether they were forbidden outright.
On that point she lost at least once. In Kahn v. Shevin (1974), she challenged a Florida property tax exemption for widows that was not available to widowers. The Court upheld it, reasoning that the exemption compensated women for past economic disadvantage. It remains the clearest limit on her 1970s campaign, and the hardest case for the argument that sex-based rules are always defects.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Accomplishments and Landmark Cases
The table below is the single most useful thing in this article, because it answers the question most biographies blur: what did she actually do in each case?
| Case | Year | Legal issue | Ginsburg’s role | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reed v. Reed | 1971 | State preference for men as estate administrators | Principal author of the brief; did not argue | First time the Court struck down a sex-based law under the Equal Protection Clause |
| Frontiero v. Richardson | 1973 | Military spousal benefits for a servicewoman’s husband | Argued as amicus for the ACLU, by leave of the Court; her first oral argument | Won 8-1; four Justices endorsed strict scrutiny for sex, one short of a majority |
| Kahn v. Shevin | 1974 | Florida property tax exemption for widows only | Argued; lost | The limit of her campaign: the Court allowed a sex-based benefit framed as compensation |
| Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld | 1975 | Social Security survivor benefits denied to a widower | Argued; won unanimously | Showed that a law written to protect women harmed women workers and their families |
| Craig v. Boren | 1976 | Oklahoma beer-purchase age differing by sex | Filed an amicus brief; did not argue | Established intermediate scrutiny, the standard still used for sex classifications |
| Duren v. Missouri | 1979 | Automatic jury-duty exemption for women | Argued; won 8-1. Her last argument as an advocate | Extended the fair-cross-section jury right; her only criminal case at the Court |
| United States v. Virginia | 1996 | Male-only admissions at Virginia Military Institute | Wrote the majority opinion, 7-1 | Her most important majority; required an exceedingly persuasive justification for sex-based state action |
| Olmstead v. L.C. | 1999 | Needless institutionalization of people with disabilities | Wrote the majority opinion | Read the Americans with Disabilities Act to require community-based services where appropriate |
| Bush v. Gore | 2000 | Halt of the Florida presidential recount | Dissented | Her dissent closed with two words, I dissent, dropping the customary respectfully |
| Ledbetter v. Goodyear | 2007 | Filing deadline for pay-discrimination claims | Dissented, and read the dissent from the bench | Prompted Congress to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 |
| United States v. Windsor | 2013 | Federal non-recognition of same-sex marriages | Joined the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy | Struck down a core section of the Defense of Marriage Act |
| Shelby County v. Holder | 2013 | Preclearance formula of the Voting Rights Act | Dissented | Her best-known dissent; the formula was invalidated and Congress has not replaced it |
| Obergefell v. Hodges | 2015 | Constitutional right to same-sex marriage | Joined the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy | Nationwide marriage equality |
Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975): the case she called a gem
Stephen Wiesenfeld’s wife Paula died in childbirth. She had been the family’s primary earner. When he applied for Social Security survivor’s benefits so he could care for their infant son himself, he was refused, because the statute paid those benefits to mothers and not to fathers.
Ginsburg argued the case and won a unanimous Court. Her framing is what makes it instructive. She did not present it mainly as discrimination against a widower. She presented it as discrimination against Paula Wiesenfeld, who had paid the same Social Security taxes as a man and purchased less protection for her family with them. The law harmed the woman who worked, the man who wanted to parent, and the child who would be raised by neither.
That is the whole strategy in one case: identify the sex-based rule, then show the Court that it damages everyone it touches.
Craig v. Boren (1976): the standard she won without arguing
Oklahoma allowed women to buy low-alcohol beer at eighteen and made men wait until twenty-one. The facts are almost comic. The result is not.
The Court used the case to announce a middle tier of review for sex classifications: the government must show that the distinction is substantially related to an important governmental objective. That test, intermediate scrutiny, still governs today.
Ginsburg filed an amicus brief. She did not argue the case. Crediting her with the decision overstates her role; crediting her with the groundwork that made the decision possible does not, since the Court built the standard out of the sequence of cases she had assembled since Reed.
Duren v. Missouri (1979): her last argument, for a convicted murderer
Missouri let any woman opt out of jury service simply by asking. The practical result was that juries were overwhelmingly male. Billy Duren, convicted of murder, challenged his conviction on the ground that his jury was not drawn from a fair cross-section of the community.
Ginsburg argued it and won. The case is worth including for two reasons. It is the only time she appeared at the Court as a criminal defense lawyer, and it shows that her theory of sex discrimination was not about benefiting women as a class. An exemption that sounds like a courtesy to women stripped a defendant of a constitutional protection and, at the same time, told women their civic obligations were optional.
United States v. Virginia (1996): her defining majority opinion
The Virginia Military Institute, a public college, admitted only men. Rather than open its doors, Virginia created a separate leadership program for women at a private women’s college with fewer resources, a different method, and none of VMI’s prestige.
Writing for a 7-1 Court, Ginsburg held that the exclusion violated the Equal Protection Clause and that the parallel program did not cure it. Her opinion set a demanding formulation: a government defending sex-based action must offer an exceedingly persuasive justification. Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection, she wrote, when official policy denies women full citizenship stature simply because they are women.
She was careful about what she was not saying. The opinion acknowledges that physical differences between men and women are real and enduring. The constitutional problem is using those differences to rank people or restrict what they may attempt. Twenty-five years after she lost the argument for strict scrutiny in Frontiero, she wrote the opinion that made intermediate scrutiny bite almost as hard.
Olmstead v. L.C. (1999): the opinion almost nobody mentions
Two women with mental illness and developmental disabilities in Georgia remained confined in a state institution after their own clinicians agreed they could live in the community. Ginsburg wrote for the Court that unjustified institutional isolation of people with disabilities is a form of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Olmstead reshaped how states deliver disability services and is the legal foundation of community-based care across the country. It appears here because a biography built only on gender cases misrepresents her judicial work, and because it is an unusually clear example of the kind of statutory opinion she wrote well: careful, limited, and consequential.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a Supreme Court Justice
Thirteen years on the D.C. Circuit
President Jimmy Carter nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 14, 1980, and the Senate confirmed her on June 18, 1980. She served there for thirteen years.
Those years are usually skipped, and they should not be. The D.C. Circuit handles a heavy load of administrative and regulatory law, and Ginsburg built a record there as a judge who sided with colleagues across the ideological spectrum and wrote narrow opinions. That reputation is precisely why a Democratic president later saw her as confirmable.
The 1993 appointment
President Bill Clinton announced her selection on June 14, 1993, to fill the seat of the retiring Justice Byron White, and submitted the formal nomination on June 22. The Senate confirmed her 96 to 3 on August 3, 1993. She took the judicial oath on August 10.
She became the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor, and the first Jewish woman ever to do so. She served 27 years, until her death in 2020.
The confirmation was not uncontested in the way people assume. Some women’s organizations were uneasy about her, because she had criticized the reasoning in Roe v. Wade. Her declining to answer hypothetical questions frustrated senators on both sides. The lopsided vote reflects a different Senate culture, not unanimous enthusiasm.
How she approached the job
Ginsburg’s judicial method was the opposite of her advocacy. As a lawyer she had chosen cases to move the law one step at a time; as a judge she thought courts generally should move one step at a time too. In a 1993 lecture she argued that measured judicial decisions tend to secure durable change, while sweeping ones can provoke backlash that undoes the gain.
She was also an institutionalist in a way that surprises people who know her only as a dissenter. Her closest friendship on the Court was with Justice Antonin Scalia, whose constitutional views were close to the inverse of hers. They traveled together, attended the opera together, and exchanged draft opinions early so each could sharpen the other’s. That friendship is frequently sentimentalized into a lesson about civility. The more interesting point is professional: she thought a dissent written against the strongest version of the opposing argument was a better dissent.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Most Famous Dissents
What a dissent is, and what it is not
A dissenting opinion is written by a Justice who disagrees with the Court’s decision. It has no legal force. It does not bind anyone, and it does not become law by waiting.
What a dissent can do is narrower and real. It can be addressed to Congress, inviting legislation. It can preserve an argument for a future Court. And it can explain to the public what the majority decided, which is sometimes its most practical function. Ginsburg used all three. She also reserved a distinctive beaded collar, which she wore when announcing a dissent from the bench, a step Justices take only when they regard a decision as seriously wrong.
Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007): the dissent that became a statute
Lilly Ledbetter spent years as a supervisor at a Goodyear plant in Alabama, and learned late in her career that she had been paid less than every one of her male counterparts. A jury agreed she had been underpaid. The Supreme Court reversed by 5–4, holding that her claim was untimely because the clock started with the original discriminatory pay decision years earlier.
Ginsburg dissented and read it aloud from the bench. Her argument was practical: pay is secret, and a rule that starts the clock before the worker could possibly know of the discrimination makes the right unenforceable. She closed by inviting Congress to correct the Court’s reading of the statute.
Congress did. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 provides that each discriminatory paycheck restarts the filing period. It was the first bill President Barack Obama signed into law, on January 29, 2009. Ginsburg kept a framed copy in her chambers.
This is the exception that proves the rule. It worked because the case turned on a statute Congress could simply rewrite, not on the Constitution.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013): the dissent that did not
Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act set the formula determining which jurisdictions had to get federal approval before changing their election rules. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held the formula unconstitutional because it rested on decades-old data.
Ginsburg’s dissent produced her most quoted line. Discarding preclearance because it had succeeded in reducing discrimination, she wrote, is like <cite index=”82-1″>throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet</cite>.
It is important to be accurate about the outcome. The dissent did not prevail, Congress has not enacted a new coverage formula, and the preclearance requirement has remained inoperative ever since. The dissent is famous. It did not change the law.
Bush v. Gore (2000)
When the Court halted the Florida recount and effectively settled the presidential election, Ginsburg dissented. She ended without the customary courtesy word, writing simply that she dissented. In the Court’s conventions that omission is a deliberate signal, and it was noticed.
What readers should take from these
Two lessons sit underneath the whole set. First, a Justice in the minority cannot deliver outcomes; she can only make an argument and address it to someone who can act. Second, the dissents people remember are the ones written in plain language. Ginsburg’s rhetorical reach grew as her ability to command majorities shrank, which is a comment on the Court’s composition after 2010 as much as on her.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Political Views and Judicial Philosophy
She was commonly described as the leader of the Court’s liberal wing, and in her later years that description fit her voting record. It is still a label rather than an explanation, and it conceals a judicial philosophy that was in several respects cautious.
Where the label fits
Ginsburg reliably supported broad readings of equal protection, voting rights, reproductive rights, and antidiscrimination statutes, and she generally favored congressional authority to enforce civil rights. She supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment throughout her life, arguing that an explicit constitutional guarantee of sex equality would be more secure than one assembled by judges from the Fourteenth Amendment.
Where the label misleads
Her best-known heterodox position concerns Roe v. Wade. Ginsburg supported abortion rights without qualification. What she criticized was the Court’s method: she argued that the 1973 decision reached too far too fast, shutting down state legislative movement that was already underway, and that it would have been better grounded in equality than in privacy. She made that argument before her nomination, and it nearly cost her support from women’s organizations in 1993. Reporting that presents this as opposition to abortion rights is simply wrong.
She also voted with conservative colleagues often enough that her record resists a simple chart, particularly in business, procedure and criminal-procedure cases, and she was a persistent advocate of judicial minimalism in an era when both wings of the Court were increasingly willing to decide broadly.
Credible criticism
A biography that never criticizes its subject is a press release. Three criticisms are substantial and well documented.
The 2016 Trump remarks. In July 2016, Ginsburg criticized presidential candidate Donald Trump in interviews with the Associated Press, The New York Times and CNN, including calling him a faker. The response was bipartisan and sharp; editorial boards generally considered the comments improper for a sitting Justice, and Trump called on her to resign. She issued a statement calling the remarks ill-advised and said judges should avoid commenting on candidates for public office. The episode remains a genuine lapse in judicial ethics, and she treated it as one.
The decision not to retire. Beginning around 2013, commentators and some legal scholars urged her to step down while a Democratic president could name her successor. She declined, saying she would serve while she could do the work at full strength. After her death six weeks before the 2020 election, her seat was filled by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and the Court’s composition shifted. Whether that outcome should be laid at her feet is contested; that the criticism is serious and widely held is not.
The limits of incrementalism. Scholars who otherwise admire her have argued that her preference for narrow rulings left some doctrines underdeveloped, and that her Roe critique underestimated how quickly state legislative progress would have stalled. These are reasonable disagreements among people who read the same opinions.
Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg Support LGBTQ Rights?
Yes. Her support is documented in her votes, in her conduct off the bench, and in her questioning at oral argument. She did not, however, write the major marriage-equality opinions, and she should not be credited with them.
Her role in the marriage cases
In United States v. Windsor (2013), the Court struck down the section of the Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal recognition to lawfully married same-sex couples. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), it held that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote both majority opinions. Ginsburg joined them. She wrote no separate concurrence in either.
Her most visible contribution came at oral argument in Windsor, where she pressed the point that withholding federal recognition created two tiers of marriage, describing the lesser tier with a memorable dairy metaphor that was widely reported at the time. The remark was a question from the bench, not a holding, and it is often quoted as though it were part of an opinion.
She also joined the 2020 majority in Bostock v. Clayton County, decided three months before her death, which held that firing an employee for being gay or transgender is sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That outcome rests on the same analytical move she had spent the 1970s teaching courts to make: if the employee’s sex changes the result, the rule discriminates on the basis of sex.
Off the bench
In August 2013, two months after Windsor, Ginsburg became the first Supreme Court Justice to officiate a same-sex wedding, marrying her friend Michael Kaiser, then president of the Kennedy Center, to the economist John Roberts. She went on to officiate others. Justices normally avoid conduct that signals a view on a pending question; she judged, correctly, that her position was already clear from her vote.
Keeping the credit straight
Marriage equality was the work of decades of litigation by many lawyers and organizations, and the decisive judicial voice was Kennedy’s. Ginsburg’s contribution was a reliable vote, a sharply framed question, and a body of equal protection reasoning that later advocates used. That is a substantial record. It is not the same as authorship.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes: Her Most Famous Words and What They Meant
Ginsburg is one of the most misquoted public figures in recent American history. Social media attributes to her a large volume of material she never said. The lines below are ones that can be traced.
On women in positions of authority
Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.
She used this formulation repeatedly in interviews and public remarks, usually adding that women should not be treated as the exception. It is a claim about institutions rather than individuals: the problem is not that a particular woman was excluded but that the room was designed to function without any.
The companion line is her answer to how many women on the Supreme Court would be enough. She would say nine, and note that nobody had ever questioned a Court of nine men.
The words she borrowed, and the credit she gave
At her first Supreme Court argument in Frontiero, Ginsburg quoted the nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights campaigner Sarah Grimké: I ask no favor for my sex. Grimké went on to ask only that men remove their feet from women’s necks.
This matters because the line is now widely attributed to Ginsburg herself. She was quoting, deliberately and with attribution, and the choice tells you something about how she framed her case. She was not asking the Justices for sympathy. She was asking them to stop.
On how change happens
Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.
This is the clearest statement of her judicial philosophy in ordinary English, and it explains both her advocacy and her criticism of decisions she thought moved too fast. It is also the sentence most at odds with her popular image as a defiant dissenter.
On dissent
I dissent.
Supreme Court Justices conventionally write that they respectfully dissent. Ginsburg dropped the courtesy word in Bush v. Gore, and the phrase later became the title of children’s books and the text on merchandise. Readers should know that the two words are a technical signal inside a professional convention, not a slogan she coined.
On persuasion
In her 2015 Radcliffe Medal remarks she advised fighting for the things you care about, but doing it in a way that leads others to join you. The point is strategic rather than sentimental, and it describes her actual method: she won cases by making judges comfortable enough to agree with her.
A note on attribution
If a quotation circulating under her name is long, perfectly polished, and conveniently suited to a current political argument, treat it as unverified until you find it in a speech, an opinion, or an on-the-record interview. My Own Words is the most reliable single place to check.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Books and Writings
Ginsburg wrote a great deal, but she wrote only one book for a general readership, and several of the best-known RBG books are about her rather than by her. The distinction matters when you are buying.
| Title | Author | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Own Words | Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams | 2016 | By her. A selected collection of her speeches and writings |
| Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik | 2015 | About her. A popular biography growing out of the Tumblr blog |
| Text, Cases and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination | Kenneth M. Davidson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Herma Hill Kay | 1974 | By her, as co-author. The first American law school casebook on the subject |
| Civil Procedure in Sweden | Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anders Bruzelius | 1965 | By her, as co-author. The product of her Swedish research years |
My Own Words (2016)
Published by Simon & Schuster, this is a curated selection rather than a memoir, assembled with her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams. The range is genuinely unusual. The earliest item is an editorial she wrote for her elementary school paper in 1946, at thirteen, about the newly signed United Nations Charter. Later sections cover gender equality, the internal workings of the Court, opera, her Jewish identity, her friendship with Justice Scalia, and the text of several dissents she read from the bench.
It is the right book for a reader who wants her reasoning in her own voice. It is the wrong book for a reader who wants a narrative life story, because she does not tell one.
Notorious RBG (2015)
Irin Carmon, then a reporter at MSNBC, and Shana Knizhnik, who created the Tumblr blog that produced the nickname, wrote an illustrated popular biography combining reporting, annotated opinions and photographs. It is accessible and well sourced, and it is explicitly a work of admiration rather than a critical assessment. Read it for the cultural story; read her opinions for the legal one.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Movies and Documentaries
Three screen works are worth knowing, and the difference between them is the difference between evidence and adaptation.
| Title | Year | Format | Director | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RBG | 2018 | Documentary | Betsy West and Julie Cohen | Her whole career and her late-life celebrity |
| On the Basis of Sex | 2018 | Dramatized feature film | Mimi Leder | Her early career and one formative case |
| RUTH: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words | 2019 | Documentary | Freida Lee Mock | Her advocacy and judicial record, told through her own recorded words |
RBG (2018)
The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018 and became an unexpected commercial success. It combines archival footage, oral argument recordings, and interviews with Ginsburg, her family, her former clerks and journalists who covered her. It received two Academy Award nominations, including Best Documentary Feature.
Its value to a reader researching her life is that it uses primary material. When you hear her argue, you are hearing the actual 1970s recordings.
On the Basis of Sex (2018)
Felicity Jones plays the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with Armie Hammer as Martin Ginsburg, Justin Theroux as the ACLU’s Mel Wulf, Sam Waterston as Harvard dean Erwin Griswold and Kathy Bates as Dorothy Kenyon. Mimi Leder directed. The screenplay is by Daniel Stiepleman, Ginsburg’s nephew, and the film was released in the United States on December 25, 2018.
The story centers on Moritz v. Commissioner, the tax case she and her husband took to the Tenth Circuit on behalf of a never-married man denied a caregiver deduction. That focus is a smart choice, because Moritz genuinely was the template for everything that followed.
It is still a dramatization. Scenes are compressed, conversations are invented, and events are rearranged for pace. Ginsburg herself reportedly thought the film got the substance of the women’s rights work right, which is a fair assessment, and a different claim from documentary accuracy. Do not cite the film for a fact.
RUTH: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words (2019)
Freida Lee Mock’s documentary is built around Ginsburg’s own recorded statements across her career as professor, advocate, judge and Justice, and uses illustration and animation to explain the constitutional arguments. It received a wider virtual-cinema release in early 2021, after her death. Of the three, it is the most focused on the legal reasoning rather than the life story.
Why she became a cultural figure at all
The Notorious RBG nickname began in June 2013, when Shana Knizhnik, then a New York University law student, created a Tumblr blog in response to Ginsburg’s dissent in Shelby County v. Holder. The name adapted that of the Brooklyn rapper The Notorious B.I.G., a joke resting on the contrast between a small, soft-spoken woman in her eighties and the swagger the name implies. Ginsburg knew about the blog, approved of it, and gave away merchandise bearing the name.
It is worth noticing what started it: not a movie, not a book, and not a majority opinion, but a dissent about voting rights that did not win.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Cause of Death: What Happened in September 2020?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at her home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 87. The Supreme Court’s official announcement gave the cause as complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was surrounded by her family.
Two decades of illness
Ginsburg’s cancer history was long and, until the end, public. She was treated for colorectal cancer in 1999, underwent surgery for early-stage pancreatic cancer in 2009, and had surgery in December 2018 to remove growths from her left lung. In July 2020 she disclosed a recurrence and began chemotherapy, saying she remained able to do the work.
She missed very little. The Associated Press reported that she kept an active schedule through three weeks of radiation treatment, and for two decades she was among the better-known examples in American public life of someone working through serious long-term cancer care.
NPR reported that days before her death she dictated a statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera expressing the wish that her replacement wait until a new president had been installed.
What followed
Her body lay in repose at the Supreme Court on September 23 and 24, where thousands came to the building’s front steps. On September 25 she lay in state in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, becoming the first woman and the first Jewish American to receive that honor. She was interred at Arlington National Cemetery on September 29, after Yom Kippur, beside her husband.
The institutional consequence
A Supreme Court vacancy is filled by presidential nomination and Senate confirmation, and there is no fixed timetable. Ginsburg died forty-six days before the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett on September 26, and the Senate confirmed her on October 26, 2020, eight days before the election.
That sequence changed the Court’s composition from a 5–4 split with a frequently decisive median vote to a 6–3 majority, and several of the doctrines Ginsburg had defended were revisited in the years after. Partisans drew opposite lessons from the timing, and those arguments continue.
What can be stated without taking a side is narrower: the seat was filled quickly, the balance of the Court shifted, and the episode became a central example in the ongoing argument about how Supreme Court vacancies should be handled. Nothing about the outcome was predetermined by her death, and nothing about it was accidental either.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legacy: What Changed, and What Remains Unfinished?
The honest assessment separates three things that often get merged: legal precedent, individual influence, and social change.
What the precedent did
The cases Ginsburg built between 1971 and 1979, together with the opinion she wrote in 1996, established that government classifications based on sex receive meaningful constitutional scrutiny. In practice this ended a category of law: statutes assigning benefits, obligations, or opportunities by sex as a matter of administrative convenience. Survivor benefits, jury service, military dependents’ allowances, estate administration and public military education were all reorganized as a result.
This is durable but not absolute. The Court never adopted strict scrutiny for sex, which was her actual goal. Intermediate scrutiny is a real test, but it is a weaker one, and it leaves more room for a government to justify a distinction than the standard applied to race.
What one judge can and cannot do
Ginsburg did not end gender discrimination, and she never claimed to. Courts respond to cases that litigants bring; they do not initiate. The 1970s campaign succeeded partly because a wider movement had already changed public expectations enough that the arguments could land.
Her specific contribution was craft. She identified which cases to bring, in what order, with which clients, and she wrote the briefs. That is unglamorous work, and it is also the part that was genuinely hers.
What remains unfinished
The Equal Rights Amendment she supported has still not been ratified in a form recognized as part of the Constitution. The pay-discrimination problem that produced the Ledbetter dissent was addressed procedurally, not substantively, by the 2009 statute. The voting rights formula struck down in Shelby County has not been replaced by Congress. These are not failures of her career so much as a demonstration of its limits: she could win arguments about how a statute reads, and she could not make Congress act.
Why she is still studied
Law students read United States v. Virginia because it is the clearest statement of the modern sex-discrimination standard. Litigators study her 1970s briefs because they are a working model of strategic impact litigation. And a general reader can learn something specific from her record that is hard to get elsewhere: that durable legal change usually comes from choosing the right small case, not from the biggest argument available.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ruth Bader Ginsburg
What is Ruth Bader Ginsburg best known for?
For establishing, as a lawyer in the 1970s, that the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause limits sex-based classifications, and later for her Supreme Court dissents, especially in Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Shelby County v. Holder.
How old was Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died?
87. She was born March 15, 1933, and died September 18, 2020.
Who was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband?
Martin D. Ginsburg, a leading tax lawyer and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. They married in 1954; he died in 2010.
Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg have children?
Two. Jane Carol Ginsburg, a Columbia Law School professor, and James Steven Ginsburg, founder of Cedille Records.
Where did Ruth Bader Ginsburg study law?
She attended Harvard Law School and earned her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1959, where she tied for first in her class.
Why was she called the Notorious RBG?
An NYU law student, Shana Knizhnik, created a Tumblr blog by that name in June 2013 after Ginsburg’s dissent in Shelby County v. Holder. The name adapts that of the rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg support LGBTQ rights?
Yes. She joined the majorities in United States v. Windsor, Obergefell v. Hodges and Bostock v. Clayton County, and in 2013 became the first Supreme Court Justice to officiate a same-sex wedding. She did not write the marriage-equality opinions; Justice Anthony Kennedy did.
What is the most famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote?
Most likely her statement that women belong in all places where decisions are being made. Note that the frequently attributed line about asking no favor for her sex was a quotation from the abolitionist Sarah Grimké.
What books did Ruth Bader Ginsburg write?
Her only general-audience book is My Own Words (2016), a collection of her speeches and writings. Notorious RBG was written about her by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. She also co-authored the first American law school casebook on sex-based discrimination in 1974.
What movies were made about Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
The documentary RBG (2018), the dramatized film On the Basis of Sex (2018) starring Felicity Jones, and the documentary RUTH: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words (2019).
What was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ethnicity?
She was a Jewish American born in Brooklyn. Her father emigrated from Russia as a teenager; her mother was born in New York shortly after her own parents arrived from Poland.
Where is Ruth Bader Ginsburg buried?
Arlington National Cemetery, beside her husband. She was interred on September 29, 2020.