At oral arguments, her questioning is pointed and betrays detailed familiarity with the parties’ legal arguments and the record in the case.

She often talks about her workouts with a trainer, whom she has called “my physical fitness guardian since 1999.”

Justice Ginsburg was named to the court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. She was the first Democratic appointment since 1967, when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall.

Justice Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn in 1933, graduated from Cornell in 1954 and began law school at Harvard. After moving to New York with her husband, she transferred to Columbia, where she earned her law degree.

She taught at Columbia and Rutgers and was a leading courtroom advocate of women’s rights before joining the court. As director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, she brought a series of cases before the court that helped establish constitutional protections against sex discrimination.

Her litigation strategy invited comparison to that of Justice Marshall, who was the architect of the civil rights movement’s incremental legal attack on racial discrimination before he joined the court.

In a 2016 interview, she was critical of President Trump in the midst of the presidential campaign.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” she said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”