A Legal Giant
ON MARCH 15, 2019, LEGIONS OF RUTH BADER Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses across the country.
This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court Justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the 5-ft. tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. Some 19 months later, her iron will and gritty determination were no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Sept. 18, 2020, at age 87, of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released that day by the Supreme Court.
In the early 1970s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name,” Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.
She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that
