Ginsburg, Ruth Bader (1933–)

• Author: Kathryn Abrams
• Pages: 1195-1198

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In 1960, Justice FELIX FRANKFURTER declined to offer a clerkship to recent law graduate Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explaining that the candidate was impressive but he was not "ready to hire a woman." Thirty-three years later, on August 10, 1993, Ginsburg took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Ginsburg's legal career not only spanned this period of transformation, however; her work also catalyzed the change in women's employment opportunities. As a Columbia Law School professor and as director of the Women's Rights Project of the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU), she selected, briefed, and argued a series of constitutional challenges to laws that discriminated between men and women. Through these cases, often brought on behalf of male plaintiffs, Ginsburg sought to demonstrate that laws based on invalid stereotypes injured both women and men. Working incrementally, from the least controversial cases to the more challenging, Ginsburg persuaded the courts to establish gender equality in a range of public opportunities. As a Court of Appeals judge, and later as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has demonstrated many of the same qualities that marked her pathbreaking work as a litigator. She has manifested a strong commitment to gender equality, marking cases from sexual harassment to equal educational opportunity with her distinctive, liberal feminist vision. But she has also reflected the pragmatic, incrementalist strategy that distinguished her as a litigator. She has often decided cases narrowly, and she has sometimes urged procedural grounds as a basis for building consensus or deferring controversial choices.

Ruth Bader was born March 15, 1933, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Her father, Nathan Bader, owned small clothing stores. Her mother, Celia Bader, whom Justice Ginsburg describes as a formative influence, died of cancer the day before her daughter's graduation from James Madison High School. Ginsburg attended Cornell University, where she graduated with high honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Cornell, she met Martin Ginsburg, whom she married shortly after her graduation in 1954. The Ginsburgs then moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Martin Ginsburg served in the U.S. Army, and Ruth Ginsburg gave birth to their first child, Jane. (A second child, James, was born a decade later.) In 1956 the Ginsburgs moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where both were enrolled at Harvard Law School. At the time that the Justice was a first-year student, there were only nine women in a class of over five hundred students. Their presence was viewed not only as atypical, but as problematic. Dean Erwin Griswold, entertaining the women students at a dinner at his home, asked each to explain in turn how she justified taking a position in the class that would otherwise have gone to a man. Despite these pressures, Ginsburg excelled at her studies, and earned a place on the Harvard Law Review. She enjoyed comparable success at Columbia, to which she transferred when her husband took a job in New York City. Notwithstanding these achievements, she was not offered a single job on graduation. "Many firms were just beginning to hire Jews," Ginsburg has explained, "and to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot was an impediment ? but motherhood was the major impediment. The fear was I would not be able to devote my full mind and time to a law job." Through the determined effort of her academic mentors, she obtained a clerkship with Judge Edmund Palmieri, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who resolved to hire her only after securing the agreement of a recent male law graduate that he would leave his law firm position to assume the clerkship if Ginsburg did not "work out."

Following her clerkship, Ginsburg joined the Columbia Project on International Civil Procedure. In 1963 she was

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offered a...