The Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “can project the daunting stillness of a seated monarch,” Jeffrey Toobin writes in his Profile of Ginsburg this week. “She is tiny—about five feet tall and a hundred pounds—and her face at rest conveys a pursed-lipped skepticism. She dresses with a dowager’s elegance, often in exotic shifts acquired on her travels around the world; she sometimes wears long gloves indoors.” A groundbreaking litigator for women’s rights before being appointed to the bench, Ginsburg has worn many aspects in her eighty years. Here are photographs of Ginsburg as a girl in Brooklyn, as a law graduate who left Columbia as co-valedictorian (but with no job offers), as a young mother, and as an advocate whose greatest legacy, Toobin argues, may be in the cases that she argued before what was then an all-male Supreme Court—and won.





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The first eleven photographs from the collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.