Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or RBG, was one of the most prominent Supreme Court justices of our
time.
On the court from 1993 until her death in 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had her fingerprints
all over the SCOTUS, whether in majority opinions or dissents.
Here's the untold truth of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
According to the American Bar Association, the average U.S. Supreme Court opinion contains
4,751 words.
Each of those words serves a purpose, whether it's helping to establish the facts of a case,
identifying legal questions, or laying out the rationale and ramifications of a ruling.
Those words have power to change laws and lives, so every sentence must be carefully
crafted.
Luckily for RBG, one of her college professors was a phenomenal wordsmith.
Per NBC, while studying at Cornell as an undergrad, Ginsburg took a European literature class
taught by Vladimir Nabokov, who famously authored Lolita.
In case you haven't read it, Lolita is the fictional first-person account of a man who
abuses his stepdaughter after his wife dies.
The Independent called it "one of the great works of art" of the 20th century, and honestly,
if you can get past the feeling of your soul vomiting, it's really an engrossing read (emphasis
on "gross").
Anyone who can make the unspeakable enjoyable to read must be a gifted writer.
Ginsburg said of Nabokov:
"Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous
difference in conveying an image or an idea."
As a justice Ginsburg also attempted, quote, "to paint pictures" when writing opinions.
Supreme Court decisions are kind of like those math problems in school where the teacher
requires you to show your work, to show that you not only got the right solution but did
your work in the right way.
In her role as Supreme Court Justice, RBG firmly believed that women should have the
right to get an abortion but thought that Roe v. Wade was the wrong way to achieve that,
because of its implications for future abortion cases.
“It is essential to woman’s equality with man that her choice, that she be the decision
maker.”
For context, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that women could have abortions for
any reason in the first trimester of pregnancy based on their constitutionally protected
right to privacy.
However, the laws are different in the remaining two trimesters.
For Ginsburg, that legal reasoning didn’t quite add up.
As a constitutional law professor explained to the Washington Post in 2016, RBG believed
that
"for women to attain true equality with men, they must have sole control over their fertility."
By that reasoning, tying women's autonomy to a conditional right to privacy established
conditional equality and allowed for future restrictions such as the 2007 SCOTUS ruling
that upheld a federal ban on late-term abortions.
Prior to her time on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg won a series of gender equality cases, including
Frontiero v. Richardson, which made it illegal to restrict benefits for military spouses
on the basis of sex.
But not even Babe Ruth batted 1,000, so RBG was bound to lose sometime.
That time came in 1974 in the case of Kahn v. Shevin, Ginsburg's only Supreme Court loss,
according to The Conversation.
Plaintiff Mel Kahn was a widower seeking a tax exemption that Florida law only afforded
to widows.
Ginsburg argued that the law was unjust because she saw, quote, "discrimination against men
and women as equally reprehensible."
The Supreme Court disagreed in a 6-3 ruling which said that:
"single women face significantly more hardships in the job market than single men, and the
disparity is particularly true for surviving spouses."
Ironically, that disparity stemmed from the same sort of unequal treatment that Ginsburg
was fighting against in Kahn's case.
RBG’s husband Marty Ginsburg wrote in a 2010 letter to Ruth:
"You are the only person I have loved in my life.
[...] I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some
56 years ago."
RBG, quote, "might have taken a little longer" to fall in love, her son James told People,
but once her and Marty's hearts aligned, they had the kind of love some people only dream
of.
Married in 1954, Marty and Ruth completed each other.
He was an excellent chef.
She was a dreadful cook.
She was a shy introvert and he was a clever extrovert.
When they attended law school and Marty contracted testicular cancer, Ruth shouldered the load
of caring for their daughter, Jane, and arranged for Marty's friends to take notes for him.
They later won cases together as lawyers, and Marty vigorously lobbied for Ruth to be
nominated for the Supreme Court.
Sadly, he passed away from cancer in 2010.
The next day, RBG delivered the Supreme Court's majority opinion on a case, believing that,
quote, "Marty would have wanted it this way."
RBG is thought of as a feminist icon, but really she could be a hero to anyone who values
perseverance, sacrifice, and the pursuit of justice in general.
Ginsburg learned those values from her own personal hero: her mother, Celia Bader.
A garment factory worker during the Great Depression, Bader gave up her own chance to
attend college in order to fund her brother's education.
A woman with a passion for knowledge, she imbued young Ruth with a deep enthusiasm for
learning.
Per The Jewish Women's Archive, some of RBG's first childhood memories are of going to the
library with her mother.
Sadly, their time together was short.
Celia Bader contracted cancer and died the day before her daughter's high school graduation.
Looking back on their time together, Ginsburg described her mother as:
"the bravest and strongest person I have known, who was taken from me much too soon.
[...] I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women
could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons."
Celia Bader never saw her daughter blossom into a history-making lawyer, but she was
with Ginsburg in other ways.
When arguing cases before the Supreme Court she wore her mother's pin and earrings.
Political discourse in the U.S. is what the Jerry Springer Show would be if you added
more screaming and made it less classy.
So you might expect Supreme Court justices on opposite ends of the political spectrum
to at least throw books at each other on occasion.
Yet the very liberal Ginsburg and the starkly conservative Antonin Scalia were besties on
the bench.
Ginsburg and Scalia became acquainted through academic circles in the 1970s, per CNN, and
they first worked together in 1982 as members of the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
1993 marked the start of their lengthy tenure together on the Supreme Court.
The pair shared a love of opera and enjoyed each other's company so much that they traveled
abroad and liked to dine together on New Year's Eve.
Obviously, they clashed on legal matters, but their gavel battles didn't get malicious.
In fact, RBG and Scalia learned from each other, fine-tuning their own arguments in
response to the other's objections.
When Scalia passed away in 2016, Ginsburg summed up their friendship in a touching tribute:
"Toward the end of the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, tenor Scalia and soprano Ginsburg sing a duet:
'We are different, we are one,' different in our interpretation of written texts, one
in our reverence for the Constitution and the institution we serve.
From our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies."
With the sole exception of Abe Fortas, who resigned to avoid impeachment, every judge
appointed to the Supreme Court has held their position until death or voluntary retirement.
That kind of job security is hard to come by, so naturally nominees try to avoid controversy
at all costs during confirmation hearings, the kind we saw during the conformations of
Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Ginsburg did everything she could to avoid controversies of this sort, including clamming
up at key moments.
Per NPR, the Ginsburg Rule is the term Republicans use to describe the policy of refusing to
answer certain kinds of questions.
During Ginsburg's confirmation hearings she declined to answer questions about how she
might rule in specific future cases.
However, she may have been the most responsive SCOTUS nominee ever, and she thoroughly answered
questions about her interpretation of the Constitution, or "judicial philosophy."
Linguists at NYU looked at how Justice Ginsburg pronounced vowels and consonants while working
as a lawyer in the 1970s and compared that to how she spoke after becoming a judge.
A clear pattern emerged: Ginsburg appeared to suppress her accent and natural verbal
mannerisms more as a lawyer than as a judge.
Linguists attribute that shift to a phenomenon known as "accommodation," whereby a person
adjusts their speaking style to conform to their audience.
As researcher Nathan LaFave explained:
"She was a female Jewish lawyer presenting before a Supreme Court that was made up mostly
of white Protestants, at a time when feminists were being decried as strident and shrill-sounding."
Once Ginsburg ascended to a position of power and security, she presumably felt more at
ease with being herself on the bench.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg literally wrote the book on sex discrimination and the law.
Well, technically she co-wrote it, and according to law professor Wendy Williams, it was the
first casebook to cover the topic.
Between 1970 and 1980, RBG was involved in roughly 60 gender equality cases, including
more than 24 that went before the Supreme Court.
She worked tirelessly, and had such an enormous impact that she was dubbed "the Thurgood Marshall
of the women's movement."
In retrospect it seems like destiny, but when RBG first pursued a legal career, she had
no intention of becoming a trailblazer.
Ginsburg recalled enrolling in law school:
"for personal, selfish reasons.
I thought I could do a lawyer's job better than any other.
I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly."
But simply pursuing law made her a rarity.
She was one of just nine women to attend Harvard Law School in 1956, and her professor let
her know she wasn't welcome.
RBG turned out to be a phenomenal student at Harvard and Columbia Law, which she later
attended.
She was also a top-notch intern.
But she received worse pay and worse treatment than her male colleagues in the workforce
and decided to be a vehicle for change.
“I ask no favor for my sex.
All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of complications from cancer on September 18, 2020.
The Justice had cancerous growths removed in December 2018, but her history with the
disease stretched back much farther.
Ginsburg's first oncological battle happened back in 1999, six years after being appointed
to the Supreme Court.
The Washington Post reported that doctors first misdiagnosed her illness as acute diverticulitis.
Thankfully someone realized she had colon cancer before it progressed too far.
In 2009, Ginsburg was afflicted with pancreatic cancer.
Fortunately, her tumor was detected about as early as technologically possible, per
ABC.
In November 2018, her lung cancer was discovered after she fell and fractured multiple ribs.
Metastatic cancer of the pancreas ultimately ended her life, but RBG remained sharp and
active to the bitter end, making her not only a progressive political hero, but an example
of determination and drive for people of every political persuasion.