Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Fighting for Equality Between the Sexes
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became notorious as a champion of women’s rights in the 1960s and 70s.
By: Scott D. Cosenza, Esq. | September 21, 2020 | 422 Words
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo by Kevork DjansezianGetty Images)
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87 years old from pancreatic cancer. Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts said: “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague.”
Notorious RBG
Justice Ginsburg helped start and then run the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, where she argued six sex discrimination lawsuits before the Supreme Court before she was a justice there. She won five of those cases – a remarkable achievement, and one that changed forever how men and women were regarded under the law.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her husband, Martin, credit for an idea she thought helped her win. She chose male plaintiffs, hoping they would be more sympathetic. Her success came both from plaintiff selection and an excellent presentation of the arguments. In Craig v. Boren, for example, she successfully argued that an Oklahoma law allowing women to purchase beer at 18, but forbidding men from doing so until 21, was gender-based discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Speaking last year, Justice Ginsburg said that we haven’t reached full equality between the sexes yet, but she still feels optimistic for the future.
President Bill Clinton and Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo by Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)
Point Guard on the Court
Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. She became known for her commitment to left-wing politics in the law, as well as her longevity.
A few short years after she joined the Supreme Court, she authored the 7-1 opinion on government facilities or programs that discriminate on the basis of sex. Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion ended the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute, a public school. She wrote:
“Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was famously friends with Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice she seldom agreed with on law or politics. She met her husband at Cornell. As Ginsburg herself put it: “He was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain.”
Ginsburg was also the subject of a movie about her life in 2018, On the Basis of Sex, which portrayed her fight against gender discrimination in the 1960s and 70s.
