US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead after cancer battle

Clinton appointee spent her last years on the Supreme Court bench pushing back against an emboldened conservative majority.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneering figure in the fight for women’s legal equality and the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died on Friday at the age of 87.

As the most senior member of the high court’s liberal bloc, the 1993 Clinton appointee spent her last years on the bench pushing back against an emboldened conservative majority, sometimes winning surprise victories or mitigating expected defeats by peeling off a vote from Chief Justice John Roberts or former Justice Anthony Kennedy.

But it was more often a period of defeat for the liberal jurisprudence that shaped Justice Ginsburg, who attended law school and began practice during the ambitious era of the Warren Court, which she then helped steer as a women’s rights advocate in the 1970s. In recent years, she spoke most forcefully in dissent, sometimes reading from the bench, from decisions she viewed as antithetical to social progress.

Bader Ginsburg listens as US President Trump speaks during the swearing-in ceremony of Brett Kavanaugh.

“The genius of this Constitution is that, over the course of now more than two centuries, ‘we the people’ has become more and more inclusive,” she said in a 2014 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “So it includes people whose ancestors were held in human bondage. It includes Native Americans, who were not part of ‘we the people,’” when the charter was ratified in 1789.

“And, at last in 1920, half the population, women,” were brought within the polity through the 19th Amendment, she said.

In recent years, her health became a growing concern for her supporters, especially after the bitterly contested confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 cemented the court’s conservative majority under President Trump. Late that year, Justice Ginsburg underwent a surgical procedure to remove two cancerous growths on her left lung, which were discovered after a fall that left her with cracked ribs. This year, she completed a three-week course of radiation treatment for a malignant tumour on her pancreas.

Beyond her jurisprudence, the slight, bespectacled Justice Ginsburg became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon in her later years, with blogs and movies portraying her as a hero of women’s rights and liberal principles at a time when many liberal activists saw those ideas as under attack.

Her face appeared on T-shirts and handbags, often with the nickname “Notorious R.B.G.,” a mashup of her initials and the late rap star Notorious B.I.G. She was featured in a documentary, and the 2018 feature “On The Basis of Sex” focused on her early career. She was celebrated in a comic opera that cast her against Justice Scalia, “Scalia/Ginsburg.” Her daughter-in-law, opera singer Patrice Michaels, wrote a series of songs recounting episodes in her life.

Justice Ginsburg lacked the outsize personality of a Justice Scalia or Sonia Sotomayor, but in her later years emerged as possibly the court’s best-known figure beyond Chief Justice Roberts.

She also developed specialties in areas far beyond civil liberties. Justice Ginsburg was the court’s most aggressive defender of copyright, for example, an interest she said she adopted from her daughter Jane, herself an expert in intellectual property at Columbia Law School.

And she sometimes bridged the ideological divide with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow opera aficionado with whom she developed a surprising friendship, despite their pronounced ideological differences, dating from their years together on a lower court. The two became stalwart proponents of a criminal defendant’s Fifth Amendment right to confront his accusers, and of state juries’ power to impose punitive damages on wrongdoers.

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, Ruth Bader attended Cornell University where she studied literature under the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg. She accompanied him to Fort Sill, Okla., for his Army service, and then to Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of about 500. When Mr. Ginsburg took a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her degree.

Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to sit on the top US court, spent her last years on the bench pushing back against an emboldened conservative majority.

Rejected for a clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter — she said because of her gender — Justice Ginsburg instead clerked for a district court judge and then became a law professor, first at Rutgers and then at Columbia. She founded the women’s rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union and began developing test cases to challenge laws for sex discrimination, adopting Thurgood Marshall’s incremental strategy for fighting segregation.

To upend stereotypes, she often targeted laws that disadvantaged men or married couples, for instance measures that made jury duty mandatory for men but not women, or imposed a higher drinking age on men. Using that strategy she argued six cases before the Supreme Court, winning five.

US Vice President Al Gore is sworn in for his second term as vice president by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 1980, President Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1993, President Clinton helped blunt a conservative ascendancy at the Supreme Court by selecting Justice Ginsburg to succeed Justice Byron White, a Kennedy appointee who had moved to the right during his tenure.

Justice Ginsburg wasn’t the first woman on the high court — she was preceded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a 1981 Reagan appointee. But she was the first so closely identified with the women’s movement. The opinions she was most proud of vindicated women’s rights.

In 1996, she wrote a decision forcing the public Virginia Military Institute to admit women, over the sole dissent of Justice Scalia. Dissenting in 2007 from a decision sharply limiting the ability to sue employers for sex discrimination, she called on Congress to correct the majority by amending the law, which it did in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Two women embrace in front of the Supreme Court buidling paying their respects to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“I remain an ardent feminist, and I try to call people’s attention to the sometimes unconscious bias or thoughtlessness,” about gender stereotypes, she told the Journal in 2014.

Justice Ginsburg’s outspokenness at times got her in trouble. In 2016, she called then-candidate Donald Trump a “faker” and told the New York Times, “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president.” She later issued a statement calling that statement “ill-advised.” Justice Ginsburg suffered several health problems during her tenure, including two bouts of cancer, and the loss of her husband in 2010. But she resisted calls for her to retire so that President Obama could appoint a like-minded, presumably younger successor.

As the liberal justice with the greatest seniority, she could shape if not most decisions, at least the opposition.

“The dissent is trying to make clear the error into which the court has fallen,” she told the Journal in 2014. “The whole point of the dissent is that in the fullness of time, the dissent will become the prevailing doctrine. And that has happened throughout the history of this court.” Justice Ginsburg is survived by two children, Jane Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, and James, a music producer in Chicago.

The Wall Street Journal