Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies Aged 87 After Long Battle With Pancreatic Cancer
Washington, United States:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was small, but her influence was enormous – both as a champion for women’s rights early in her career and as a progressive force on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Ginsburg, only the second woman to sit as a judge on America’s highest court, died on Friday at the age of 87, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
The Brooklyn native, sporting her signature embellished collars or frilly frills, was the dean of the court and the de facto leader of the left-wing coalition on a majority Tory court.
She did not hesitate to speak out: in her dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore, who resolved the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, she made a simple “I disagree”.
The phrase became part of her unlikely legacy as a pop culture icon: late in life she was affectionately known as “Notorious RBG,” a riff on rapper’s nickname The Notorious B.I.G.
Her face framed in dark-rimmed glasses adorned T-shirts, mugs and baby outfits. Her life was the subject of two films in 2018: the documentary “RBG” and the screenplay “On the Basis of Sex”.
“As dark as it sounds, I’ve seen so many changes in my life,” Ginsburg told an audience in North Carolina in September 2019.
“Opportunities have opened up for people of all races, religions and, finally, genders.”
Against all odds
Born Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933 to a Russian Jewish immigrant family at the height of the Great Depression, she lost her mother to cancer as a teenager.
But before that, his mother encouraged Ginsburg to continue his education. She went to Cornell University, where she was a pupil of Vladimir Nabokov and met her husband Martin.
The couple enrolled in Harvard Law School together – she juggled school and raised their first child, daughter Jane, while her husband battled cancer.
She eventually graduated from Columbia University after her husband accepted a job at a New York law firm. The couple later had a second child, James.
Although Ginsburg was one of the top students in her class, she struggled to enter the legal profession.
“I had three beatings against me. First, I was Jewish. Second, I was a woman. But the murderer was I was the mother of a four-year-old,” she said in an interview with CBS in 2016.
She ended up in academia, teaching at Rutgers and Columbia universities as one of the few women on the staff.
In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union recruited Ginsburg to litigate cases of gender discrimination.
While she suspected she had been wiretapped because of her gender – “discrimination based on sex was considered a woman’s job,” she said – Ginsburg nonetheless flourished.
She eventually became general counsel for the ACLU and won five of the six gender discrimination cases she argued before the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan put it simply: she said Ginsburg “changed the face of American anti-discrimination law.”
The highest court
After a stint as a judge of the Federal Court of Appeals, Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by then President Bill Clinton in 1993 and easily confirmed by the Senate, becoming the second woman and the first Jewish woman judge.
She was seen by jurists as a slow and steady presence on the bench: she did not seek to revise precedents all at once, but rather attacked specific parts of the law in question.
Ginsburg wrote his first majority opinion in the 1996 US case against Virginia, which ruled that the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of admitting only males was unconstitutional.
As the court passed a conservative majority, Ginsburg used his dissent effectively.
She even wore what she called a “dissident collar” – metallic and armor-like. Women bought collar versions of it as a demonstration of sartorial support.
Ginsburg formed an unlikely friendship with fellow judge Antonin Scalia, a conservative “originalist” who believed the constitution should be interpreted as intended at the time of writing.
While they were polar opposites on almost all matters of jurisprudence, they shared a love of civil liberties, refined legal writing … and opera.
Their friendship was even staged in the comedy opera “Scalia / Ginsburg”.
Unlikely pop culture hero
The petite woman with a low ponytail was a force to be reckoned with in her career and was considered by many to be an inspiring figure.
His exercise regimen was turned into a workout book. Halloween costumes were popular with young girls and women. Sometimes she was depicted wearing a gold crown.
For Shana Knizhnik, one of the creators of the Notorious RBG blog, the call for justice transcends generational differences.
“She fought for ideals which even today can seem quite radical, and which were just unknown at the time,” Knizhnik said.
Ginsburg has battled cancer several times over the years and in 2010 her husband passed away.
In November 2018, she broke a few ribs in a fall. Later tests revealed cancerous nodules in his lungs. They were withdrawn a month later.
Then in August 2019, the court announced that she had undergone another round of cancer treatments, this time to treat her pancreas.
When asked about retirement, she cited the example of John Paul Stevens, who only left court at age 90, and said she would only leave when she was no longer able to to work.
Ginsburg’s replacement will be appointed by President Donald Trump, a man she criticized for his “ego” and whom she said she didn’t want to “even consider” the impact on the court.
Trump has already appointed two Tory judges during his tenure, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
