Ruth Bader Ginsburg (/ˈbeɪdər ˈɡɪnzbɜːrɡ/, born Joan Ruth Bader; March 15, 1933)[1] is

an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by
President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female
justice (after Sandra Day O'Connor) of four to be confirmed to the court (along with Sonia
Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who are still serving). Following O'Connor's retirement, and until
Sotomayor joined the court, Ginsburg was the only female justice on the Supreme Court. During that
time, Ginsburg became more forceful with her dissents, which were noted by legal observers and in
popular culture. She is generally viewed as belonging to the liberal wing of the court. Ginsburg has
authored notable majority opinions, including United States v. Virginia, Olmstead v. L.C.,
and Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc.
Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her older sister died when she was a baby, and her
mother, one of her biggest sources of encouragement, died shortly before Ginsburg graduated from
high school. She then earned her bachelor's degree at Cornell University, and became a wife and
mother before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class.
Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated tied for first in her class.
Following law school, Ginsburg turned to academia. She was a professor at Rutgers Law
School and Columbia Law School, teaching civil procedure as one of the few women in her field.
Ginsburg spent a considerable part of her legal career as an advocate for the advancement
of gender equality and women's rights, winning multiple victories arguing before the Supreme Court.
She advocated as a volunteer lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and was a member of its
board of directors and one of its general counsels in the 1970s. In 1980, President Jimmy
Carterappointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she
served until her appointment to the Supreme Court. Ginsburg has received attention in American
popular culture for her fiery liberal dissents and refusal to step down; she has been dubbed
the "Notorious R.B.G."[2]

Early life and education

Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the
second daughter of Celia (née Amster) and Nathan Bader, who lived in the Flatbushneighborhood.
Her father was a Jewish emigrant from Odessa, Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire, and her
mother was born in New York to Austrian Jewish parents.[3][4][5] The Baders' older daughter Marylin
died of meningitis at age six, when Ruth was 14 months old.[1]:3[6][7] The family called Joan Ruth "Kiki",
a nickname Marylin had given her for being "a kicky baby".[1]:3[8] When "Kiki" started school, Celia
discovered that her daughter's class had several other girls named Joan, so Celia suggested that the
teacher call her daughter "Ruth" to avoid confusion.[1]:3 Although not devout, the Bader family
belonged to East Midwood Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue, where Ruth learned tenets of
the Jewish faith and gained familiarity with the Hebrew language.[1]:14–15 At age 13, Ruth acted as the
"camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program at Camp Che-Na-Wah in Minerva, New York.[8]
Celia took an active role in her daughter's education, often taking her to the library.[8] Celia had been
a good student in her youth, graduating from high school at age 15, yet she could not further her
own education because her family instead chose to send her brother to college. Celia wanted her
daughter to get more education, which she thought would allow Ruth to become a high school
history teacher.[9] Ruth attended James Madison High School, whose law program later dedicated a
courtroom in her honor. Celia struggled with cancer throughout Ruth's high school years and died
the day before Ruth's high school graduation.[8]
Bader attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was a member of Alpha Epsilon
Phi.[10] While at Cornell, she met Martin D. Ginsburg at age 17.[9] She graduated from Cornell with a
bachelor of arts degree in government on June 23, 1954. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and
the highest-ranking female student in her graduating class.[10][11] Bader married Ginsburg a month
after her graduation from Cornell. She and Martin moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was
stationed as a Reserve Officers' Training Corps officer in the Army Reserve after his call-up to active
duty.[9][12][11] At age 21, she worked for the Social Security Administration office in Oklahoma, where
she was demoted after becoming pregnant with her first child.[7] She gave birth to a daughter in
1955.[7]
In the fall of 1956, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine
women in a class of about 500 men.[13][14] The Dean of Harvard Law reportedly asked the female law
students, including Ginsburg, "Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of a
man?"[15][16] When her husband took a job in New York City, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law
School and became the first woman to be on two major law reviews: the Harvard Law
Review and Columbia Law Review. In 1959, she earned her law degree at Columbia and tied for first
in her class.[8][17]

Early career
At the start of her legal career, Ginsburg encountered difficulty in finding employment.[18][19][20] In 1960,
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected Ginsburg for a clerkship position due to her
gender. She was rejected despite a strong recommendation from Albert Martin Sacks, who was a
professor and later dean of Harvard Law School.[21][22][a]Columbia Law Professor Gerald Gunther also
pushed for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New
York to hire Ginsburg as a law clerk, threatening to never recommend another Columbia student to
Palmieri if he did not give Ginsburg the opportunity and guaranteeing to provide the judge with a
replacement clerk should Ginsburg not succeed.[7][8][23] Later that year, Ginsburg began her clerkship
for Judge Palmieri, and she held the position for two years.[7][8]

Academia
From 1961 to 1963, Ginsburg was a research associate and then an associate director of the
Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure; she learned Swedish to co-author a book
with Anders Bruzelius on civil procedure in Sweden.[24][25] Ginsburg conducted extensive research for
her book at Lund University in Sweden.[26] Ginsburg's time in Sweden also influenced her thinking on
gender equality. She was inspired when she observed the changes in Sweden, where women were
20 to 25 percent of all law students; one of the judges whom Ginsburg watched for her research was
eight months pregnant and still working.[9]
Her first position as a professor was at Rutgers Law School in 1963.[27] The appointment was not
without its drawbacks; Ginsburg was informed she would be paid less than her male colleagues
because she had a husband with a well-paid job.[20] At the time Ginsburg entered academia, she was
one of fewer than 20 female law professors in the United States.[27] She was a professor of law,
mainly civil procedure, at Rutgers from 1963 to 1972, receiving tenure from the school in 1969.[28][29]
In 1970, she co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus
exclusively on women's rights.[30] From 1972 to 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the
first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination.[29] She also
spent a year as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford
University from 1977 to 1978.[31]
In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) and, in 1973, she became the Project’s general counsel.[11] The Women's Rights
Project and related ACLU projects participated in over 300 gender discrimination cases by 1974. As
the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases
before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five.[21] Rather than asking the court to
end all gender discrimination at once, Ginsburg charted a strategic course, taking aim at specific
discriminatory statutes and building on each successive victory. She chose plaintiffs carefully, at
times picking male plaintiffs to demonstrate that gender discrimination was harmful to both men and
women.[29][21] The laws Ginsburg targeted included those that on the surface appeared beneficial to
women, but in fact reinforced the notion that women needed to be dependent on men.[21] Her
strategic advocacy extended to word choice, favoring the use of "gender" instead of "sex", after her
secretary suggested the word "sex" would serve as a distraction to judges.[29] She attained a
reputation as a skilled oral advocate and her work led directly to the end of gender discrimination in
many areas of the law.[32]
Ginsburg volunteered to write the brief for Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), in which the Supreme
Court extended the protections of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to
women.[29][33][b] She argued and won Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677(1973), which challenged a
statute making it more difficult for a female service member to claim an increased housing allowance
for her husband than for a male service member seeking the same allowance for his wife. Ginsburg
argued that the statute treated women as inferior, and the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in her
favor.[21] The court again ruled in Ginsburg's favor in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S.636 (1975),
where Ginsburg represented a widower denied survivor benefits under Social Security, which
permitted widows but not widowers to collect special benefits while caring for minor children. She
argued that the statute discriminated against male survivors of workers by denying them the same
protection as their female counterparts.[35]
Ginsburg filed an amicus brief and sat with counsel at oral argument for Craig v.
Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976), which challenged an Oklahoma statute that set different minimum
drinking ages for men and women.[21][35] For the first time, the court imposed what is known
as intermediate scrutiny on laws discriminating based on gender, a heightened standard of
Constitutional review.[21][35][36] Her last case as a lawyer before the Supreme Court was 1978's Duren
v. Missouri, 439 U.S.357 (1979), which challenged the validity of voluntary jury duty for women, on
the ground that participation in jury duty was a citizen's vital governmental service and therefore
should not be optional for women. At the end of Ginsburg's oral argument, then-Associate
Justice William Rehnquist asked Ginsburg, "You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony on the
new dollar, then?"[37] Ginsburg said she considered responding, "We won't settle for tokens", but
instead opted not to answer the question.[37]
Legal scholars and advocates credit Ginsburg's body of work with making significant legal advances
for women under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.[29][21] Taken together, Ginsburg's
legal victories discouraged legislatures from treating women and men differently under the
law.[29][21][35] She continued to work on the ACLU's Women's Rights Project until her appointment to
the Federal Bench in 1980.[29] Later, colleague Antonin Scalia praised Ginsburg's skills as an
advocate, "she became the leading (and very successful) litigator on behalf of women's rights—
the Thurgood Marshall of that cause, so to speak". This was a comparison that had first been made
by former Solicitor General Erwin Griswold who was also her former professor and dean at Harvard
Law School, in a speech given in 1985.[38][39][c]