Part 2
"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the United States Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.
Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."
In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of
Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.
The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male supreme court: no.
It was the first time the court had ever struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.
And that was just the beginning.
Ginsburg (left) joins the only three other women to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in a celebration of O'Connor, the first woman justice, at the Newseum in Washington in 2012.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.
As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.
Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in
Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.
"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.
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Over the ensuing years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but to women as well.
In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.
"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.
During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.
The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.'"
After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.
The Supreme Court's Second Woman
In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.
She was not first on his list. For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in
Roe v. Wade.
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But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her--hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.
Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.
Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends. Indeed,
an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.
Ginsburg speaks at the memorial service for Antonin Scalia, fellow Supreme Court justice and friend, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in March 2016.
Susan Walsh/AP
Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.
Dissenting in
Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.
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In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court's decision in
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."
Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"
And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.
"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."
And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.
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Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad
, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020. During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.
Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.
A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell....The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."
Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."
Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.
In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.
Some liberals criticicized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.
"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. "
And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.
