Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office August 10, 1993
Nominated by	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	Byron White
Judge of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
In office June 30, 1980 – August 10, 1993
Nominated by	Jimmy Carter
Preceded by	Harold Leventhal
Succeeded by	David Tatel
Personal details
Born	(1933-03-15) March 15, 1933 Brooklyn, United States
Spouse	Martin Ginsburg (1954–2010)
Children	Jane Ginsburg James Steven Ginsburg
Alma mater	Cornell University Harvard Law School Columbia Law School

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg (born March 15, 1933) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg took the oath of office August 10, 1993. Generally she votes with the liberal wing of the Court. She is the second female justice (after Sandra Day O'Connor) and the first Jewish female justice.

Ginsburg spent a considerable portion of her career as an advocate for the equal citizenship status of women and men as a constitutional principle. 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 counsel in the 1970s. She was a professor at Rutgers School of Law—Newark and Columbia Law School. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 2009, Forbes named her among the 100 Most Powerful Women.

Early life and education

Born in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, New York, Ruth Joan Bader was the second daughter of Nathan and Celia (née Amster) Bader. The family nicknamed her "Kiki". They belonged to the East Midwood Jewish Center, where she took her religious confirmation seriously. At age thirteen, Ruth acted as the "camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program at Camp Che-Na-Wah in Minerva, New York.

Her mother took an active role in her education, taking her to the library often. Bader attended James Madison High School, whose law program later dedicated a courtroom in her honor. Her older sister died when she was very young. Her mother struggled with cancer throughout Ruth's high school years and died the day before her graduation.

She graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was a sister of Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority. She graduated Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts degree on June 23, 1954, and that fall enrolled at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was one of only nine women in a class of more than five hundred. When her husband took a job in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School and became the first woman to be on two major law reviews, the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review. In 1959, she earned her Bachelor of Laws degree at Columbia and tied for first in her class. In 2009 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Willamette University, and in 2010 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University.

Career

Early career

In 1960, despite a strong recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter turned down Ginsburg for a clerkship position apparently because she was a woman. Later that year, Ginsburg began a clerkship for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

From 1961 to 1963 she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, learning Swedish to co-author a book on judicial procedure in Sweden. Ginsburg conducted extensive research for her book at the University of Lund in Sweden.

She was a professor of law at Rutgers from 1963 to 1972. 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. From 1972 until 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination. She also taught in Tulane University Law School's summer-abroad program.

In 1977, she became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. As the chief litigator of the ACLU's women's rights project, she argued several cases in front of the Supreme Court and attained a reputation as a skilled oral advocate.

Her last case as a lawyer before the Court was 1978's Duren v. Missouri, which challenged laws and practices making jury duty voluntary for women in that state. Ginsburg viewed optional jury duty as a message that women's service was unnecessary to important government functions. At the end of Ginsburg's oral presentation, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist asked Ginsburg, "You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony on the new dollar, then?" Ginsburg, being cautious, did not respond to his question.

Judicial career

Ruth Bader Ginsburg officially accepts the nomination from President Bill Clinton on June 14, 1993.

U.S. Court of Appeals

President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 14, 1980, to the seat of recently deceased judge Harold Leventhal. She served there for thirteen years, until joining the Supreme Court. During her 13-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg made 57 hires for law clerk, intern, and secretary positions. At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, it was revealed that none of those hired had been African-Americans, a fact for which Ginsburg (an "aggressive support[er] [of] disparate-impact statistics as evidence of intentional discrimination") was sharply criticized.

Supreme Court

Nomination and confirmation

President Bill Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on June 14, 1993, to fill the seat vacated by retiring Justice Byron White. Ginsburg was recommended to Clinton by then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

During her subsequent testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the confirmation hearings, she refused to answer questions regarding her personal views on most issues or how she would adjudicate certain hypothetical situations as a Supreme Court Justice. A number of Senators on the committee came away frustrated, with unanswered questions about how Ginsburg planned to make the transition from an advocate for causes she personally held dear, to a justice on the Supreme Court. Despite this, Ginsburg refused to discuss her beliefs about the limits and proper role of jurisprudence, saying, "Were I to rehearse here what I would say and how I would reason on such questions, I would act injudiciously".

At the same time, Ginsburg did answer questions relating to some potentially controversial issues. For instance, she affirmed her belief in a constitutional right to privacy, and explicated at some length on her personal judicial philosophy and thoughts regarding gender equality. The U.S. Senate confirmed her by a 96-to-3 vote and she took her judicial oath on August 10, 1993.

Supreme Court jurisprudence

Ginsburg characterizes her performance on the Court as a cautious approach to adjudication, and argued in a speech shortly before her nomination to the Court that "[m]easured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable." Ginsburg has urged that the Court allow for dialogue with elected branches, while others argue that would inevitably lead to politicizing the Court.

Although Ginsburg has consistently supported abortion rights and joined in the Court's opinion striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law in Stenberg v. Carhart 530 U.S. 914 (2000) she has criticized the Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973) as terminating a nascent, democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws which might have built a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights. She discussed her views on abortion rights and sexual equality in a 2009 New York Times interview, in which she said regarding abortion that "[t]he basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman." Other statements that she made during the interview were criticized by conservative commentator Michael Gerson as reflecting an "attitude . . . that abortion is economically important to a 'woman of means' and useful in reducing the number of social undesirables."

Ginsburg has also been an advocate for using foreign law and norms to shape U.S. law in judicial opinions , in contrast to the textualist views of her colleagues Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito. Despite their fundamental differences, Ginsburg considers Scalia her closest colleague on the Court, and they often dine and attend the opera together.

Notable cases

United States v. Virginia 518 U.S. 515 (1996): Ginsburg, in agreement with the majority of the Supreme Court, stated that the Virginia Military Institute failed to show "exceedingly persuasive justification" for its male-only admission policy and was therefore violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

• United States v. O'Hagan 521 U.S. 642 (1997) Court Opinion
• Olmstead v. L.C. 527 U.S. 581 (1999) Court Opinion
• Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. 528 U.S. 167 (2000) Court Opinion
• Bush v. Gore 531 U.S. 98 (2000) Dissenting
• Eldred v. Ashcroft 537 U.S. 186 (2003) Court Opinion
• Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp. 544 U.S. 280 (2005) Court Opinion
• Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. 550 U.S. 618 (2007) Dissenting
• Gonzales v. Carhart 550 U.S. 124 (2007) Dissenting
• Ricci v. DeStefano Template:555 U.S. (2009) Dissenting

Ginsburg Precedent

More than a decade passed between the two successive terms in which Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were appointed and the date another justice left the Court. By that time, both the Congress and the White House had switched to Republican control. When O'Connor announced her retirement in the summer of 2005, with Chief Justice Rehnquist's death a few months later, both sides began to squabble about just what kinds of questions President George W. Bush's nominees would be expected to answer. The debate heated up when hearings for Roberts began in September 2005. Republicans used an argument they called the "Ginsburg Precedent", which centered on Ginsburg's confirmation hearings. In those hearings, she did not answer some questions involving matters such as abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state, and disability rights. Only one witness testified against Ginsburg at her confirmation hearings, and the hearings lasted only four days.

In a September 28, 2005, speech at Wake Forest University, Ginsburg said that Roberts's refusal to answer questions during his Senate confirmation hearings on some cases was "unquestionably right." However, as the next sentence in her speech made clear, this statement did not affirm the existence of a precedent that the Senate Judiciary Committee was obliged to follow; it merely meant that a nominee could, at his discretion, refuse to answer questions about how he might rule.

Democrats had taken issue with Roberts's refusal to answer certain questions, saying Ginsburg had made her views very clear, even if she did not comment on some specific matters, and that because of her lengthy tenure as a judge, many of her legal opinions were already available for review.

During Roberts's confirmation hearings, Senators Joe Biden (Delaware), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Roberts himself brought up Ginsburg's hearings several times as they argued over what questions she answered and what Roberts was expected to answer. The precedent was again cited several times during the confirmation hearings for Justice Samuel Alito.

1997 vice-presidential inauguration

Ginsburg administered, at his request, Vice President Al Gore's oath of office to a second term during the second presidential inauguration of Clinton on January 20, 1997.

Personal life

A few days after graduating from Cornell, Ruth Bader married Martin D. Ginsburg, later an internationally prominent tax lawyer, and then (after they moved from New York to Washington DC, upon her accession to the D.C. Circuit) professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Their daughter Jane (born 1955) is a professor at Columbia Law School, and their son James Steven Ginsburg (born 1965) is founder and president of Cedille Records, a classical-music recording company based in Chicago, Illinois. After the birth of their daughter, her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer. During this period, Ginsburg attended class and took notes for both of them; typed her husband's papers to his dictation; and cared for their daughter and her sick husband — all while making the Harvard Law Review. They celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary on June 23, 2010. Martin Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic cancer on June 27, 2010.

Illness

Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999 and underwent surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation therapy. During the process, she did not miss a day on the bench. On February 5, 2009, she again underwent surgery related to pancreatic cancer. Ginsburg's tumor was discovered at an early stage. Ginsburg was released from a New York hospital, eight days after the surgery and heard oral arguments again four days later. On September 24, 2009 Ginsburg was hospitalized for lightheadedness following an outpatient treatment for iron deficiency and was released the following day. Despite rumours that she would retire as a result of poor health and the death of her husband, Ginsburg has denied that she is planning to step down from the Court anytime soon.

See also

• Bill Clinton U.S. Supreme Court candidates
• Demographics of the U.S. Supreme Court
• List of Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court
• List of law clerks of the U.S. Supreme Court

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• List of U.S. Supreme Court cases during the Rehnquist Court
• List of U.S. Supreme Court cases during the Roberts Court
• List of U.S. Supreme Court Justices by time in office

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Bibliography

• Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 140003003X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Garner, Bryan A. (2009). "Foreword". Garner on Language and Writing. Chicago: American Bar Association. ISBN 9781590315880. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Supreme court official biography (PDF format)
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a publication of the Federal Judicial Center.