Vale Ruth Bader Ginsburg
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admitted to hospital in July, people were lining up to donate their organs to help her recovery. The 87-year-old Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court returned to the bench with no need for such sacrifice. Sadly, on Friday Bader Ginsburg – AKA “RBG” – succumbed to pancreatic cancer and died at her home in Washington DC.
In 27 years Bader Ginsburg had rarely left her seat on the bench vacant. Until 2018 she had not missed a day of oral arguments, not even when she was undergoing chemotherapy or after surgery for colon cancer, or the day after her husband passed away in 2010.
She was diminutive – barely reaching Bill Clinton’s shoulder in photos of her 1993 Supreme Court inauguration – but tough. And it was this toughness, her determination to hang on as one of four liberal-leaning justices out of a total of nine in the court, says Rosalind Dixon, a professor of law from the University of NSW, that made her so “amazing”.
“She loved the law and believed she contributed a powerful voice, a dissenting voice, in the court,” says Professor Dixon, an expert in constitutional law and gender and co-lead of UNSW’s Grand Challenge on Inequality. “Certainly, if President Trump had appointed anyone else [if she had retired], she would have been deeply concerned. I think she showed stubborn determination to keep on fighting Trump to her last breath.”
Late in life, RBG began to generate a brand of fangirl excitement captured in the 2018 documentary RBG. The film traced her career from earning a law degree in 1959 to her role as a campaigner for the equal rights of women in the ’60s and ’70s, to her appointment to the US Supreme Court. Her life story also inspired the 2018 film On The Basis of Sex.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn and grew up in a neighbourhood filled with immigrant and first-generation American families who dreamed big for their kids. Her father, Nathan, a Jewish emigrant from Odessa, worked in haberdashery; her mother, Celia, was born in New York to Austrian-Jewish parents and although she loved reading and graduated from high school, was denied a college education in favour of her brother. Ruth won scholarships and moved through high school to Cornell University in upstate New York – where at 17 she met her husband Martin – and later Harvard. She worked in academia and in 1972 helped found the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. She became the Project’s general counsel in 1973 and worked with the ACLU until she was appointed to the Federal Bench in 1980.
Professor Dixon says one of her defining features was a very clear legal-political vision. “In the ’70s and ’80s she often took discrimination cases by men in order to persuade an all-male court of the injustice of sex discrimination, and that was a very successful strategy.” These cases included that of a widower, caring for his children, who was denied social security benefits and thus not treated the same as a widow would have been. This highlighted that sex discrimination cuts both ways and paved the legal way ahead for reversing discriminatory practices against women.
“When she was appointed to the High Court [that] allowed her to complete her vision by authoring key opinions like the Virginia Military Institute case,” says Professor Dixon, referring to the 1996 landmark case that reversed male-only admissions to the prestigious military school.
“From the ’70s through to the ’90s, first as a lawyer and then as judge, she cemented the idea that sex-based classification demanded scrutiny in the US and if it wasn't fully on a par with race-based discrimination, it was close to it in terms of judicial scrutiny. And I think that had a big impact on laws and policies in the US and a big impact on the zeitgeist.”
Her legion of fans, many of them young women, loved her for her fiery dissents and her refusal to step down. Professor Dixon says over the last five to 10 years, she developed a reputation for being a vocal questioner and dissenter. “She is often in the minority because the US court is very polarised and has become more conservative because of appointments by George W. Bush and Donald Trump.”
In the lead up to the 2016 US election, Bader Ginsburg was outspoken about the prospect of a Trump presidency. In an interview with The New York Times in 2016 she said,“I can’t imagine what this place would be – I can’t imagine what the country would be – with Donald Trump as our president.” Bader Ginsburg went on to say that a Trump victory would give rise to a joke her late husband would often make – that it might be “time to move to New Zealand”.
“The comments she made prior to the election indicated her concerns about Donald Trump,” says Professor Dixon. “And even though I think it was ill-advised for a sitting judge to comment like that, I think that’s part of her popularity.”
She was also known for her love of opera and her fabulous collection of jabots, collars worn with the traditional black robe of a justice. She wore certain ones for special court judgments; by far the most popular was her “dissent collar”. The ornamental Banana Republic bib necklace, which she received when she attended Glamour’s Woman of the Year event in 2012, has been so popular the US retailer reissued it last year, donating 50 per cent of the proceeds to the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.
Even though RBG was a “true trailblazer”, Professor Dixon cautions that her legacy may need to be tempered. “Part of what we admired about RBG is that she was an incredibly hard worker, but that hard work is not the model that we want to see if we’re going to have true gender equality. If gender justice is to be achieved in our time, it can’t be because everyone works 80 or 100 hours a week.
“I love the fact she kept on battling and doing her job, but her vision of gender justice is ultimately a vision of its time which placed a lot of emphasis on formal legal protection. The future of gender justice has to focus more on socio-economic context and the ability to combine work and family life and some of the challenges which I don't think she gave us the roadmap for answering.”
Amanda Hess, writing in The New York Times last month, suggests RBG’s fandom was out of step with the America of today and that her incremental style of “consensus building” was in stark contrast to the justice that is being demanded, especially by people of colour, on the streets of American cities.
So how will history judge RBG?
“She will be remembered for gender jurisprudence and the fact that she contributed so much to how Americans understand equal protection and what it guarantees,” says Professor Dixon. “I think she was really a remarkable person and jurist. The Supreme Court won’t be the same without her, no question.”
Words_ Patricia Sheahan
Image sourced from_ Sebastian Kim/August
Illustration sourced from_ @bijoukarman