FOREVER NOTORIOUS

 

It has been nearly been two weeks since Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away.

In my lifetime I have witnessed the number of women holding various political offices increase and there has always been a woman on the Supreme Court, the first one being Sandra Day O’Connor who was confirmed to the court in September 1981 nearly two years before I was born. It was followed by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen being added to the court in the first half of Barack Obama’s first term.

The number of women on the Supreme Court will likely return to three due to Senate Republicans rushing to confirm Trump’s pick of Amy Coney Barrett prior to the November election which is rapidly approaching. I will comment on the political ramifications in another post so that I can focus on Justice Ginsburg’s life and what her court tenure meant.

But often we forget the path it took to get there mainly because we are so used to it. The paths to education have largely been equalized over a twenty-year period that began in the 1950s that coincided with the Civil Rights movement and crested in the 1970s among a feminism wave. When Ginsburg started on her path with graduating from Cornell in 1954, she got a job working at the Social Security Administration office in Oklahoma due to husband being stationed at Fort Sill. Ginsburg was demoted from her position not because of gross incompetence but because she had the audacity to get pregnant.

Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956 where she was one of 9 women in a class of 500 men. It is believed that the dean of the school invited the women to dinner and asked the prospective law school students “Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of man?” Today that dean would be drummed out the moment that question was asked, but unfortunately in 1956 that was the standard. Harvard did admit women to its law school in 1950 but it was nearly 20 years after other schools had done so.

Upon her husband taking a job in New York City, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia and became the first woman to be on two major law reviews and earned her law degree in 1959. You would think that this would be a chance for Ginsburg to emerge but again, note the time period. A Supreme Court justice, Felix Frankfurter, rejected her despite a strong recommendation from a professor. The reason being?

She was a woman.

It finally took some arm twisting by a Columbia law professor to a district court judge for Ginsburg to earn her first opportunity as a clerk. She held that position while also being her career in academia starting with working in research and then teaching at Rutgers starting in 1963, followed by Columbia at 1972 until 1980.

Ginsburg was one of the about twenty women law professors during that time period and co-authored the first law school textbook on sex discrimination. And she rightfully had experience in that field due to that when she started teaching, Ginsburg was told that she would be paid less than a man because she was married to a husband with a high-income job. Again, the concept boggles the mind but once again, note the time period.

With her personal experience in sex discrimination, Ginsburg co-founded the first law journal in the US that focused exclusively on women’s rights in 1970 and two years later co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU and then became the organization’s general counsel. In that position, Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court – which at this time had zero women among its nine-member panel – six gender discrimination cases, winning five of them.

Ginsburg argued in cases that the Equal Protect Clause to the 14th Amendment also applied to women and was successful in achieving significant legal advances for women. It also sent a signal to state legislatures to do what they can to make things more equal between men and women.

With all the talk about expanding the federal judiciary and how unprecedented it would be in doing so, it was that act of court expansion in 1978 which finally gave Ginsburg the opportunity to serve as a judge. She was confirmed to the DC Circuit in June 1980. Many court observers say that the DC Circuit is a tryout for the Supreme Court in part due to that lower court’s proximity to the highest court in the land.

Ginsburg was added to the Supreme Court in August 1993 and served until her death in September 2020. Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the 1996 landmark case United States v. Virginia which struck down Virginia Military Institute’s policy of only allowing men to enroll. She was in the majority for key cases regarding LGBTQ rights, abortion access, and the continued constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Despite a long career of fighting for her place and for others, Ginsburg reached immortality for two words.

I dissent

Those two words became the impetus for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that was one of the first bills signed into law by Barack Obama in 2009. The notoriety was increased in 2013 after the disastrous Shelby County v. Holder ruling where the court in a 5-4 decision held that portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 were unconstitutional. Ginsburg, in her dissent, stated that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

For that dissenting opinion is how Ginsburg was elevated to notorious status. Already she was one of the justices on the Earth court in the animated series Futurama, but suddenly people began to take notice in this tiny Jewish woman who wore rather flamboyant collars that coincided with her black judge’s robes.

Ginsburg, who had five cancer diagnoses with her first one in 1999, rarely missed a day of oral arguments. In order to keep her health up due to the intense treatment, she trained with a former Army reservist who was attached to a Special Forces Unit. By the time that she was 80, Ginsburg could do 20 push-ups which is 20 more than what I can do.

Her trainer at her casket in the US Capitol did push-ups in her honor.

She formed an unlikely friendship with Antoni Scalia and was regularly seen at the opera with him.

There were two films produced that profiled her life: one was a documentary titled RBG and the other On the Basis of Sex.

The ultimate honor came with Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon playing her and Ginsburg praised the actress for the impression. They met publicly at an off-Broadway 2019 performance of Fiddler on the Roof. In the recent season premiere of Saturday Night Live, McKinnon paid tribute to Ginsburg by appearing in the audience after the Weekend Update segment.

There will be attempts to replace her, even duplicate her notoriety.

The truth is, you cannot.

She earned that status and became one of the most well-known Supreme Court justices joining the likes of Chief Justices John Jay, John Marshall, William Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, Earl Warren, and Warren Burger as well Associate Justices Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O’Connor. In her unique way, she broke down the invisible barrier that appears to separate the Supreme Court from the general public.

And that long journey is why Justice Ginsburg will be forever notorious.