Rbg (revered by Generations): Defying and Redefining Labels

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 1
• Publication year: 2021
• Author: By Rupa G. Singh
• topic: Civil Rights,Constitutional Law

RBG (Revered By Generations): Defying and Redefining Labels

By Rupa G. Singh

Rupa G. Singh is a certified appellate specialist who handles complex civil appeals and critical motions in state and federal court at Niddrie Addams Fuller Singh LLP. She is founding president of the San Diego Appellate Inn of Court, former chair of the County Bar's Appellate Practice Section, and the proud mother of three self-proclaimed RBG groupies.

When nominating her to the United States Supreme Court, President Bill Clinton said that then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg had proved herself too thoughtful for such labels as "liberal" or "conservative." Yet average Americans, even those unable to identify more than one or two Supreme Court justices, came to know Justice Ginsburg by an infamous label: the Notorious RBG. The affectionate title came from a blog of the same name by second-year NYU law student Shana Knizhniks, who did a play on rapper Biggie Smalls' Notorious BIG moniker to honor Justice Ginsburg after her powerful dissent in a landmark voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder (2013) 570 U.S. 529.

To Justice Ginsburg's credit, she embraced this tongue-in-cheek nickname gracefully, even recognizing the sentiment behind it as a way to amplify her voice, not define or diminish it. In a 2017 NBC interview, she said that she was proud of Knizhniks for channeling her anger and disappointment at the Supreme Court for holding a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 no longer constitutional in Shelby County into something positive by raising awareness of the decision and Ginsburg's dissenting opinion on her blog.

I like to think that RBG would accept with just as much spirited appreciation the many other labels that she has inspired, put in perspective as much by academic giants as by everyday lawyers evaluating her life's impact on themselves and their children, especially young girls.

Hero

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky remarked in a recent seminar about the Supreme Court's October 2020 term that we are grieving for RBG so much because she was a hero during a time when there are no longer many heroes in our profession. RBG was a true real-life hero, one who represented our aspiration to be heroes ourselves. Her superpower was her brain, reflected in her brilliant pen.

[Page 13]

Middle-school me would have loved to have known eighth-grader RBG who wrote an editorial for her school newspaper about the five greatest documents the world had known to date. With clear-eyed brevity, she made the case for why the United Nations Charter should join the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, the British Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Declaration of Independence as documents that benefitted humanity "as a...