We are once
again honoring the memory of another giant in our fight for equal justice for
all – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Only a few weeks ago, we were mourning the
death of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis on this blog. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, “the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Of course, it bends only because people make
it bend through their movements, sacrifices, and daunting belief that we can bend
it. Having formerly served on our local ACLU
Board for several decades and our state board for one year, I and my colleagues
were so influenced by Justice Ginsburg’s life and work. Her work on the ACLU especially with the ACLU
Women’s Rights Project was well known.
We are
reprinting the ACLU’s obituary below so our readers can see the full legacy she
has left. Her work fighting for gender equality is particularly poignant in
this year when we recognize the anniversary of the 19th Amendment to
the Constitution. One hundred years
after the expansion of suffrage, Justice Ginsberg was fighting many of the laws
that continued to discriminate on the basis of sex and there were many — in
education, employment, reproductive rights, mortgages, credit cards, loans,
house rentals, prison, the military and sections of the Social Security Act. Here is the legacy she has left us as an “activist
intellectual” as Eleanor Holmes Norton once put it.
ACLU
Obituary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who first rose to national prominence as an
ACLU lawyer fighting for equal rights for women, has died at 87 years old.
She began
Harvard Law School as a young mother and one of only nine women in her class, and
became the architect of a legal strategy to eradicate gender discrimination in
the United States. She modeled her approach after that of Thurgood Marshall on
race discrimination, planning for a series of cases at the Supreme Court, each
precedent paving the way for the next that would further expand rights and
protections. In 1993, she joined the court as an associate justice, and over
the decades became a cultural icon beloved for her vision and passion in
defending the rights of women.
Ginsburg was
born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Jewish parents with roots in Eastern Europe. Her
mother Celia, who died shortly before Ginsburg graduated from high school,
instilled in her a sense of independence and a love of learning. She went on to
Cornell University, where at 17, she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg.
They married after graduation, and soon had a daughter, Jane.
Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where
women were barred from living in the dorms and from using certain campus
facilities. When the dean hosted a dinner for the first-year women, Ginsburg
recalled, “He asked each of us to stand up and tell him what we were doing
taking a seat that could be occupied by a man.”
Discrimination
dogged her early career. After transferring to Columbia Law School, she
graduated first in her class, but she had trouble getting a job. She later
accepted a position teaching civil procedure at Rutgers Law School, where her
employers informed her that she would be paid less than her male colleagues
because she had a husband who earned a good income. She and other female
professors filed a federal class-action discrimination case against the
university, and won. For fear of demotion, she hid her pregnancy with her son,
James, until after her contract renewal. Simply living her personal and
professional life at a time of openly discriminatory policies for women had
positioned her to fight.
In the late
1960s, Ginsburg began volunteering for the ACLU, and soon wrote a brief in the
case Reed v. Reed. Sally Reed had separated from her husband, and when their
son died, both parents sought to be appointed the executor of his estate. Idaho
law automatically appointed the father because he was a man. Ginsburg named as
co-authors on the brief two women lawyers whose ideas had helped build her
arguments: Dorothy Kenyon, an early advocate for women’s rights, and Pauli
Murray, a brilliant African American activist who had pioneered the argument
for applying the 14th Amendment to women’s rights. In 1971, the Supreme Court
ruled for Sally Reed, the first time it would strike down a law for treating
men and women differently. The court ruled that giving a mandatory preference
to one sex is “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the
Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” In an ACLU memo, Ginsburg
called the victory “a small, guarded step.”
In 1972,
Ginsburg joined the ACLU as the founding director of the new Women’s Rights
Project. That same year, she also accepted a job as the first female tenured
law professor at Columbia.
In the early ‘70s, gender discrimination
affected most aspects of life. The Women’s Rights Project tallied hundreds of
federal laws that discriminated on the basis of sex — in education, employment,
reproductive rights mortgages, credit cards, loans, house rentals, prison, and
the military. Most legal scholars believed the law should treat women
differently, to protect them. For instance, some laws prevented female
employees from lifting more than 15 pounds, or working at night. Some lawyers
were beginning to take on cases of sex discrimination, often to help a specific
woman, not necessarily with a view toward changing the law on gender equality.
Ginsburg wanted to do just that.
In 1973,
Ginsburg took on another Supreme Court case. Sharron Frontiero was an Air Force
officer whose husband, Joseph, had been denied the housing and medical benefits
that female spouses of male Air Force officers received automatically.
In writing
both muscular and spare, Ginsburg expanded the scope of her brief to encompass
the history of women’s subjugation, with references to Alexis de Tocqueville
and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and pared down the language to a precise and
devastating argument. “That’s when it dawned on me how brilliant she is,” said
Brenda Feigen, then co-directing the Women’s Rights Project with Ginsburg. “She
was at her most creative and profound,” she said. “She told the story of sex
discrimination — how it had been and how it had to end.”
It was in
Frontiero that Ginsburg gave her first oral argument before the Supreme Court.
“I knew that I was speaking to men who didn’t think there was any such thing as
gender-based discrimination and my job was to tell them it really exists,” she
has said. To make the point to the nine men who were sitting on the bench, she
quoted the nineteenth-century women’s-rights advocate Sarah Grimkè: “I ask no
favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off
our necks.” She apparently succeeded. Feigen, who was by Ginsburg’s side in the
court, recalled, “There was not a single question from any of the justices.
They must have been transfixed.”
Ginsburg’s team won the case. Yet they did not
convince a majority of the justices that sex discrimination should be treated
exactly like racial discrimination. “My expectation, to be candid, was that I
would repeat that kind of argument, maybe half a dozen times. I didn’t expect
it to happen in one fell swoop,” Ginsburg later said.
While at the ACLU, Ginsburg played a role in
34 Supreme Court cases, and won five of the six cases she argued before the
court — Frontiero, Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, Califano v. Goldfarb, Duren v.
Missouri, and Edwards v. Healy. Many of her cases involved sex discrimination
against men, which she felt might rouse more sympathy among the male justices,
and show that discrimination hurts everyone.
Ginsburg
sometimes said that one of her favorite cases involved a man whose wife died in
childbirth, leaving him alone to care for their newborn son. Stephen
Wiesenfeld’s wife had been the primary breadwinner, and upon her death, he went
to the local Social Security office to inquire about survivors’ benefits for a
parent and learned that he didn’t qualify because he was a man. Ginsburg
convinced the Supreme Court that the section of the Social Security Act that
denied fathers benefits because of their sex was unconstitutional. She won a
unanimous decision.
“Ruth was careful to build brick upon brick,”
said Aryeh Neier, then executive director of the ACLU. “She wanted to create a
stable structure. She wasn’t interested in reaching for the roof right away. In
my tenure at the ACLU, this was the most clearly planned litigation strategy.”
Ginsburg’s legacy would be felt at the ACLU
long after her departure in 1980 to become a judge on the U.S. Court of
Appeals.
President Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the
Supreme Court in 1993. She was introduced at her confirmation hearing by
Eleanor Holmes Norton, Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from
Washington D.C., who had served as the assistant legal director at the ACLU.
“When Ruth Ginsburg founded the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, today’s axiom that
the 14th Amendment applies to women was not axiomatic at all,” she said. “Judge
Ginsburg has spent her life making things how they ought to be. Using her
gifted mind, honed by indefatigably hard work, she has used the law, always
carefully, always defensibly, for all of those left at the margins, for want of
a lawyer or a judge with the brilliance and commitment to pull them mainstream.
As a lawyer, she was an activist intellectual who brought grace to both roles.”
The last to testify at her confirmation
hearing was Stephen Wiesenfeld, the widower for whom Ginsburg won Social
Security benefits some 20 years earlier when she was at the ACLU. He described
his experience of being a newly-widowed father struggling to raise his son
without his wife’s Social Security benefits and how Ginsburg “saw immediately
the gains, the consequences, and the long range effects and the logistics of
revising this inequity in the Social Security system.”
Sen. Joe Biden, then the Chairman of the U.S
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, thanked Wiesenfeld for his testimony and
added, “I shared a similar fate that you did in 1972 and raised two children
with a professional wife who had passed away, and it is amazing how much has
changed.”
Ginsburg was
confirmed to the court in a vote of 96 to 3.
On the court, Ginsburg continued her efforts
to push for full gender equality under the 14th Amendment. In 1996, she wrote
the decision in United States v. Virginia, which struck down the male-only
admission policy at the Virginia Military Institute and established a new
standard of review for sex discrimination cases.
Over time, as the court became more
conservative, Ginsburg also became more pointed in her dissents.
In 2006, the court ruled against Lilly
Ledbetter, who had been paid less than male colleagues in comparable jobs at
the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. In a rare move, Ginsburg, then the sole
woman justice on the court, read her blistering dissent aloud from the bench.
“The court does not comprehend…the insidious way that women can be victims to
discrimination,” she accused. “The ball is in Congress’ court.” A few years
later, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.
Then in 2013, the court gutted the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. “Race-based voting discrimination still exists,” she
rebuked her colleagues, again reading her dissent. Dismantling the act, she
said later, was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you
are not getting wet.”
In a country hungry for integrity and for
leadership fighting the erosion of civil rights, a new generation of young
women branded Ginsburg “The Notorious RBG” on social media, and showed their
esteem for her in unexpected ways. Children dressed up as Ginsburg for
Halloween, her face appeared on tattoos, pillows, and shower curtains, and her
story was told in a documentary and a feature film, multiple biographies, and
several children’s books.
