Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020), aka the Notorious RBG, was on the US Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, from 1993 till her death in 2020. President Clinton, who named her to the court, called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law”. She was a huge believer in gender equality and women’s rights and, by the time of her death, the main left-leaning voice on the court.

Her death clears the way for a third Trump judge on the court, solidifying its hard-right majority – and considerably increasing Trump’s own chances of winning the 2020 election should it be disputed and thrown to the Supreme Court as Biden v Trump (2020).

Gloria Steinem, a White feminist:

“Ruth’s work made me feel as if I was protected by the US Constitution for the first time.”

Ginsburg was:

the second woman on the Supreme Court;

one of the nation’s first female law professors;

the first woman on the Harvard Law Review.

The measure of her success: In 1959, when she graduated top of her class at Columbia Law School, no top New York City law firm would hire her. That that now seems surprising is a measure of her success in helping to bring about gender equality. But that so many now despair at her death in 2020 is a measure of how fragile those gains still are.

Sexism: In the 1970s she fought court cases that would alter the legal landscape on questions of gender equality. Knowing that she would be facing male judges who did not think the law was sexist – even when it was written in a sexist way! – she often chose to champion the gender rights of men, thereby laying down the legal precedents to uphold the rights of women. She was able to persuade liberal judges by likening sexism to racism.

Ginsburg in 1975:

“a gender line … helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

Abortion: She was forthright in her support of abortion (and birth control), seeing it as a necessary right if women were to become first-class citizens.

Racism: In Shelby County v Holder (2013), when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted, she dissented, likening it to:

“throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

She was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn in New York City to Jewish immigrants. She went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn, the same public high school that Benie Sanders, Carole King and Judge Judy later went to. While she was at Cornell University (’54), Joseph McCarthy and other Republicans were fearmongering about communists – the Red Scare. It made her determined to become a lawyer:

“The McCarthy era was a time when courageous lawyers were using their legal training in support of the right to think and speak freely.”

How Ginsburg wants to be remembered:

“Just as someone who did whatever she could, with whatever limited talent she had, to move society along in the direction I would like it to be for my children and grandchildren.”

Requiescat in pace.

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

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