By: Haley Robinson, Editor-in-Chief
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – Sept. 18, 2020) aka The Notorious RBG was the second woman to ever be appointed as United States Supreme Court Justice. She was born in Brooklyn in a low-income, working-class Jewish-American home. Throughout her academic education, she studied at prestigious universities like Cornell, Harvard, and finally Columbia Law School.
At Harvard, Ginsburg faced an aggressive backlash from the male-dominated law classes she was attending; she was even told by the Dean that she was commandeering the spots of men who were more qualified. After much hard work and perseverance, she was the first woman to be a member of the “Harvard Law Review.” When her husband, Martin Ginsburg, accepted a job in New York, Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School. She still faced the same gender inequality that she did at Harvard and this sparked her fierce fight for gender equality.
Ginsburg’s list of achievements prior to her appointment to the Supreme Court was astronomical; she taught at Rutgers University Law School and then became Columbia’s first female tenured professor. She was an activist to the core serving as a director for the Women’s Rights Project where she tactfully argued six monumental cases for gender equality.
Once appointed to the Supreme Court by President Carter, she earned the reputation of being a moderate, cautious, and empathetic judge. Ruth was more famous for her “dissents” or disagreement statements. She was at the center of multiple landmark court cases such as the US v. Virginia, Sessions v. Dimaya, Olmstead v. LC, and Reed v. Reed. In recent years her most famous case among our generation is Obergefell v. Hodges which legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states.
Over the course of Ginsburg’s late-life she endured many health scares involving pancreatic, colon, and lung cancer, undergoing multiple surgeries since she took the bench. Despite the health scares, one of Ginsburg’s secret weapons to staying strong and healthy was her trainer, Bryant Johnson, who worked with her for over two decades.
In July 2020, after being hospitalized for breaking three ribs, Ginsburg confessed that she was in remission for liver cancer and that the results looked promising. However, she sadly only lasted until Sept. 2020 where she passed from metastatic pancreatic cancer in the comfort of her home in Washington D.C.
Since her passing, many citizens, especially women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, fear what will happen to cases like Obergefell v. Hodges and Roe v. Wade if a more conservative judge is funneled into the Supreme Court before the end of the election cycle. A list of issues that could be at stake are reproductive rights, voting rights, discrimination protections, the corrections system, immigrants’ rights, and healthcare policies.
