If Justice Kennedy best embodies the court’s conflicting impulses toward gays and women, Justice Ginsburg is in many ways his opposite. She voted with him in all of the major gay rights cases, but in women’s rights cases she has issued a series of sharp dissents.

Justice Ginsburg, 81, was a prominent women’s rights litigator before she became a judge, overcoming obstacles related to her gender along the way. After attending Harvard Law School as one of nine women in a class of more than 500 and graduating from Columbia Law School, she was turned down by law firms and was refused judicial clerkships because she was a woman. When she became a professor at Rutgers School of Law, she was told she would be paid less than her male colleagues because her husband, also a lawyer, had a good job. She later became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

Speaking last week at a reception for students and alumni of Duke University School of Law, she said the Supreme Court had made a grave error in June in its Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed some employers to refuse to pay for insurance coverage for contraception based on religious objections. “There was no way to read that decision narrowly,” she said, adding that it opened the door to job discrimination against women.

“What of the employer whose religious faith teaches that it’s sinful to employ a single woman without her father’s consent or a married woman without her husband’s consent?” she asked. The court, she said, “had ventured into a minefield.”

She summarized her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case from the bench, a rare move signaling vehement disagreement, one that happens perhaps four times a term. When Justice Ginsburg issues an oral dissent, it is very often in a case concerning women’s rights.