Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns eighty this month, and she can project the daunting stillness of a seated monarch. 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. During conversations, she is given to taking lengthy pauses. This can be unnerving, especially at the Supreme Court, where silence only amplifies the sound of ticking clocks. Therefore, her clerks came up with what they call the two-Mississippi rule: after speaking, wait two beats before you say anything else. Ginsburg’s pauses have nothing to do with her age. It’s just the way she is.

There is some irony in Ginsburg’s reputation for reserve, because she is, by far, the current Court’s most accomplished litigator. Before Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., became a judge, he argued more cases than Ginsburg did before the Justices, but most of them were disputes of modest significance. Ginsburg, during the nineteen-seventies, argued several of the most important women’s-rights cases in the Court’s history. Her halting style in private never prevented her from vigorous advocacy before the bench. In those days, Ginsburg was a pioneer. When, as a forty-three-year-old Columbia Law School professor, she made a full argument before the Supreme Court, in 1976, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger stumbled when introducing her. “Mrs. Bader? Mrs. Ginsburg?” he said. (Female advocates, to say nothing of those with multi-part names, were a rarity in those days.) Later in the same case, Justice Potter Stewart made a similar mistake, calling her “Mrs. Bader.”

On one occasion, when she brought some female students to the courtroom with her, they urged her to insist that the Justices address her with the novel honorific Ms. “I decided not to make a fuss about it,” Ginsburg told me. “That wasn’t the reason I was there.” She has always prided herself on knowing which fights to pick. (Ginsburg won that 1976 case, as well as four of the five other cases she argued before the Justices.) As an advocate, Ginsburg had exquisite timing; she brought women’s-rights cases at precisely the moment the Supreme Court was willing to decide them in her favor.

As a Justice, Ginsburg enjoyed less fortunate timing. This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of her appointment to the Supreme Court, by President Bill Clinton. During that time, the Court has been dominated by conservatives, a situation that has left her as a dissenter in many of the most important cases. Since the departure of John Paul Stevens, in 2010, Ginsburg has become the senior member of the Court’s liberal quartet, which now includes Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. To a greater extent even than Stevens, Ginsburg has united the four Justices so that they speak with a single voice, especially when they are in dissent. Last year, Ginsburg wrote what was probably the most powerful opinion of her career, in the Court’s epic decision regarding the Affordable Care Act. Her endorsement of the bill’s constitutionality as a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s commerce clause gave a ringing, modern defense of the government’s authority to enact social-welfare legislation.

Today, however, public focus tends to be on Ginsburg’s age. Now that she is arriving in her ninth decade, everyone wants to know when she will leave.

Supreme Court Justices can select art for their chambers from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, and most make safe, predictable choices. Some have renderings of former Justices; many have landscapes. A Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington recently went from Antonin Scalia’s chambers to Roberts’s. Ginsburg, though, embraces an austere modernism. Her choices include paintings by mid-century Americans like Ben Cunningham and Max Weber, and her favorite work comes from Josef Albers’s haunting, and repetitive, “Homage to the Square.” (Several years ago, the Smithsonian retrieved the Justice’s prized Albers for a tour, and Ginsburg selected a lesser example from the same series to take its place.)

Ruth Bader did not grow up with such refined tastes. She was born in Brooklyn at the height of the Depression. Her father was a furrier, at a time when not many people were buying furs, and her mother, Celia Bader, was stricken with cancer while Ruth was still a girl. Her mother died the day before Ruth graduated from James Madison High School. She went to Cornell, where she met Martin (Marty) Ginsburg, who was a year older. They married just after she graduated, in 1954.

About a half century into the marriage, Justice Ginsburg held a reunion of her law clerks at the Supreme Court. As the crowd mingled, her husband walked over to her and put his arm around her. Without her realizing it, he taped a paper sign to her back: “Her Highness.” Unlike Ruth, Marty—who died in 2010—was gregarious, irreverent, and an excellent chef. He, too, was an accomplished lawyer. “He was widely acknowledged as the finest tax lawyer in the country,” Laurence Silberman, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said. Or, as Marty often described his role, “A disproportionate part of my professional life has been devoted to protecting the deservedly rich from the predations of the poor and downtrodden.” Just before their wedding, Ruth received some advice from her future mother-in-law that she has since repeated countless times. “In every good marriage, it pays sometimes to be a little deaf.” (“It works on the Supreme Court, too,” Ginsburg sometimes adds.)

After Cornell, and, for Marty, a stint in the Army (where, while stationed on a base in Oklahoma, he worked his way through the Escoffier guide to French cooking), they went on to Harvard Law School. It was a difficult couple of years. They (mostly Ruth) cared for their baby daughter, Jane, while handling the demanding coursework. Then Marty was given a diagnosis of testicular cancer. He recovered and graduated, and they moved to New York, where he began his career with Weil, Gotshal & Manges. A second child, James, was born in 1965.

Ruth took her third year of law school at Columbia. Harvard’s dean at the time refused to grant her a degree, even though she had done more of her coursework there, so she is a graduate of Columbia Law School. Several subsequent deans of Harvard Law School (including Kagan, now Ginsburg’s colleague) offered to rectify this mistake. “Marty always told me to say no,” Ginsburg said to me, “and hold out for an honorary degree from the university.” That came through in 2011, when one of the other recipients was Plácido Domingo. Ginsburg’s love of opera is nearly as great as her love of the law. At the ceremony, Domingo broke out in a semi-spontaneous serenade of the Justice. A photograph of the scene sits on the mantelpiece in Ginsburg’s chambers. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” she said.

Although Ginsburg graduated at the top of her class, in 1959, she did not receive a single job offer. (Neither did Sandra Day O’Connor when she graduated from Stanford Law, seven years earlier.) Ginsburg scrounged for work. A favorite professor, Gerald Gunther, essentially extorted a federal judge in Manhattan, Edward Palmieri, to hire Ginsburg. (“Gunther told the judge he’d never recommend another Columbia student to him unless he gave me a chance,” Ginsburg said.) Next, Ginsburg worked on a project to study, of all things, civil procedure in Sweden. (She learned Swedish for the job.) She taught procedure at the Rutgers School of Law-Newark, and received tenure in 1969.

“Theo is upset that his name isn’t more precious.” Facebook

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In the popular imagination, the nineteen-sixties were the liberal years, especially at the Supreme Court, when Earl Warren was Chief Justice. The forces of reaction, it is said, took hold in the seventies, starting with the appointment of Warren Burger as Chief Justice, in 1969. As far as feminism was concerned, though, the reverse was true. The Warren Court, for all its liberalism on civil rights, was hostile to women’s rights. In 1961, Florida law made jury service mandatory for men but only optional for women. Later that year, in Hoyt v. Florida, the Justices unanimously upheld the conviction, by an all-male jury, of a woman who was charged with killing her husband. According to the Justices, Florida could have this kind of patronizing rule for women on juries because “woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.”