Talk:Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg

1993-

RUTH BADER GINSBURG was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, Nathan Bader and Celia Amster Bader, were Jewish Americans whose families had immigrated to the United States--Celia's from central Europe four months before she was born and Nathan's from Russia when he was thirteen. An older sister, Marilyn, died at the age of eight, so Ruth Bader grew up as an only child, in the Flat bush section of Brooklyn. Her father worked first as a furrier and later, as a haberdasher.

Celia Bader played a critical role in her daughter's intellectual development. She took Ruth on frequent trips to the library and saved money to enable her daughter to attend college. Ruth excelled in high school, winning scholarships that would pay her way through college without dipping deeply into her mother's savings. Sadly, Celia struggled with cancer throughout Ruth's high school years and died the day before graduation.

Ruth Bader continued to fulfill her mother's hopes in college at Cornell University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated first among the women in her class. At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg, whom she married following her graduation in 1954. Together they decided to pursue careers in the law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School a year behind her husband, following two years in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he served in the army. Their daughter, Jane, was still a baby, and the two law students shared child care duties and household chores. Harvard Law School was less than welcoming to the nine women in its class of 1959, providing no room for them in its main dormitories. Despite the chilly atmosphere and the extra demands of her young family, Ginsburg excelled in her classes and won a spot on the law review.

During her second year at Harvard, Martin Ginsburg was diagnosed with cancer. While he underwent massive surgery and radical radiation treatments for a condition doctors told him few had ever survived, Ruth covered her husband's classes as well as her own, copying notes for him and typing his third-year paper. Martin recovered and was able to complete his course work and graduate on time. When he accepted a job as an associate with a New York City law firm, Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School so that the family could remain together. There she made law review again and graduated tied for first in her class.

Although she had superior academic credentials, Ginsburg received no job offers from New York law firms, nor was she able to obtain a clerkship interview with a Supreme Court justice. As she has recalled, her status as "a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot" was "a bit much" for prospective employers in those days. One enlightened district court judge in New York, Edmund L. Palmieri, finally hired Ginsburg as a law clerk. Twenty years later, he rated her as among the best clerks he had ever employed.

Following her clerkship, Ginsburg took part in a comparative law project sponsored by Columbia Law School. As the prime part of her work for the project, she coauthored a book on judicial procedure in Sweden. After almost daily tutoring in Swedish for several months, she traveled to Sweden to observe Swedish courts in operation. In years immediately prior to her Supreme Court appointment, Ginsburg spent some of her spare time assisting in the translation of the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure into English.

In 1963, she became the second woman to join the law faculty of Rutgers University in New Jersey. While at Rutgers, Ginsburg became pregnant with her second child, James. Worried about retaining her nontenured position, she hid her pregnancy from her employers during the school year by wearing clothes borrowed from her ever supportive, one-size-larger mother-in-law.

Her personal encounter with the special obstacles faced by women attempting to combine career and family coincided with a professional awakening. In the early 1960s, prompted in part by her reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Ginsburg recognized that the second-class treatment she had experienced was a symptom of a larger problem--social conditions that denied women choices and opportunities open to men. The law, she believed, should aid in redressing these inequities. While continuing to teach at Rutgers, Ginsburg assisted the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in litigating sex discrimination cases, prime among them, cases on behalf of school teachers who were forced to forfeit their jobs when they became pregnant. Asked by her Rutgers students to teach a course on sex-based discrimination, Ginsburg was surprised to discover how little had been written on that subject.

The Supreme Court had upheld a series of laws that treated women differently from men--for example, by preventing women from working as bartenders or lawyers under the rationale that women, as members of "the gentler sex," were in need of special protection from life's hardships. Ginsburg believed that such sex stereotyping, although ostensibly benign, demeaned women and unfairly limited their opportunities. In her view, the equal protection principle stated in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on race, should bar gender-based discrimination as well. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ginsburg found that promoting this viewpoint was an uphill battle. As she recalled at her confirmation hearings: "Race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious, and intolerable. But the response I got when I talked about sex-based discrimination was 'What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men.' I was talking to an audience that thought . . . I was somehow critical about the way they treated their wives ... [and] their daughters."

Changing these views--and the law that reflected them--could not be accomplished overnight. Victory would require persuading a majority of the Supreme Court that sex-based legal classifications should be scrutinized much more closely by the courts than other government choices. Ginsburg, like Thurgood Marshall in his battle against racial discrimination, recognized that a cautious, incremental approach would be the surest method of achieving enduring change in the law. In her words, "[t]he courts needed to be educated. That requires patience: it may mean holding back a case until the way has been paved for it."

Ginsburg launched her campaign by joining forces with the ACLU’s national office. She helped to write the ACLU’s brief in a key Supreme Court sex discrimination case, Reed v. Reed (1971), which struck down a state law that preferred men over women as administrators of decedents' estates. However, because the Court reached its decision without explicitly adopting a heightened standard of review, the ruling did not guarantee similar results in other cases.

The ACLU established a Women's Rights Project in 1972 and placed Ginsburg at the helm. Over the next eight years, she sought to persuade a majority of the Supreme Court that sex-based legal distinctions should trigger some form of heightened judicial scrutiny.

To execute this strategy, Ginsburg selected cases that would allow her to make her point on behalf of women's rights without appearing strident or radical. Her objective was to convince the Court that gender-based stereotyping harmed not only women, but all of society. Often the plaintiffs in Ginsburg's cases were men, and the well-being of families was at stake. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), a widower whose wife had died in childbirth wanted to stay home to take care of his infant son. If his wife had survived him, she automatically would have been entitled to Social Security benefits based on his salary; however, Wiesenfeld could not receive those benefits. In effect, his wife had paid her Social Security taxes at the same rate as a man, but had not obtained an equivalent measure of protection for her family. This discrepancy arose, Ginsburg argued, from society's inaccurate--and damaging--preconception that husbands are always the wage-earners and wives the dependent caregivers. A unanimous Supreme Court held the exclusion of fathers like Wiesenfeld unconstitutional, although again without explicitly applying a heightened standard of review.

Between 1972 and 1978, Ginsburg argued six cases before the Court involving sex-role stereotyping and won five. In Craig v. Boren (1976), the Court finally accepted Ginsburg’s view (expressed in a "friend-of-the-court" brief) that gender-based legal distinctions deserved heightened scrutiny.

A later generation of feminist legal scholars has criticized Ginsburg's equal protection theories. They argue that her approach failed to take account of the real differences between the sexes that may sometimes warrant laws giving women preferential treatment. Critics and admirers agree, however, that Ginsburg's work in the 1970s fundamentally altered the legal and social landscape, creating unprecedented personal and professional opportunities for women.

In 1972, Ginsburg left Rutgers to teach at Columbia Law School, where she became the first tenured woman law professor. Her distinguished teaching career and ACLU achievements won her a national reputation and prompted President Jimmy Carter to appoint her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. Martin Ginsburg moved with his wife to Washington, D.C., leaving his New York tax practice and chair at Columbia Law School to become a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

As a judge, Ginsburg garnered respect with her clear thinking, careful reasoning, and assiduous preparation for every case. Her prompt drafting of each opinion she was assigned and her scrupulous attention to the details of each case stemmed from her appreciation that the court's rulings would change the lives or practices of persons affected by judicial decisions. This sensitivity to the real-world effects of her decisions led her to take her law clerks on periodic tours of the local prisons in which some of the defendants in the court's criminal cases were incarcerated.

While serving on the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg dissented in a challenge to a statute allowing the judiciary to appoint independent counsel to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by senior executive officers. A panel of the appeals court struck down the law as an unconstitutional infringement of the separation of powers, reasoning that only the executive branch is empowered to appoint prosecutors. Ginsburg rejected this approach as excessively formalistic. She found the majority’s holding ironic, because the purpose of the independent counsel law was to maintain the balance of power among the various branches of government by curbing abuses of executive authority. In Morrison v. Olson (1988), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the statute.

The resignation of Justice Byron White in the spring of 1993 afforded President Bill Clinton the opportunity to become the first Democratic president in twenty-six years to make a Supreme Court appointment. Clinton announced that he was looking for a nominee with "a fine mind, good judgment, wide experience in the law and in the problems of real people, and somebody with a big heart." Calling Ginsburg "the Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law," he concluded that she possessed the requisite intellectual and emotional stature for the job.

Much of the initial resistance to Ginsburg's nomination came from within the feminist movement because she had expressed reservations about the reasoning of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) upholding a woman's right to choose an abortion. Ginsburg would have preferred a more measured approach--an opinion that invited gradual liberalization of state abortion laws, one that might avoid a political backlash. At her confirmation hearings, however, Ginsburg dispelled any doubts about her commitment to a woman's reproductive choice. She characterized a woman's right to choose an abortion as "something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity... And when government controls that decision for her, she's being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices."

The Senate voted 97-3 to confirm Ginsburg's nomination, and she took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. Ginsburg's second major opinion on the Supreme Court displayed her characteristic tendency to approach legal questions in terms of real-world experience. In Ratzlaf v. United States (1994), Ginsburg wrote the Court's opinion reversing a criminal conviction for "willfully violating" a prohibition on "structuring" cash transactions so as to avoid a reporting requirement applicable to transactions involving more than $10,000. A majority of the Court concluded that the prosecution had to prove the defendant knew of not only the reporting requirement, but also the prohibition on breaking up transactions to evade it. The government had argued that the very act of structuring suggested an involvement in criminal activity, such as money laundering or tax evasion, and thereby demonstrated the necessary bad intent. In rejecting this argument, Ginsburg listed several innocent reasons that might motivate an ordinary citizen to break up cash deposits into small sums, such as a fear of burglary resulting from the bank's reports.

Ginsburg is known as a ruthless editor with a keen eye for detail. Her soft voice and reserved manner hide great perceptiveness and a warm interest in people. She is an opera devotee who has appeared in full period costume--complete with wig and fan--as an extra in a Washington Opera production.