The current Supreme Court judges include Chief Justice John G. Roberts, and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Other Associate Justices are Samuel Alito, Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is only the second female to join the Supreme Court bench, and at 82, she is also the oldest. Born in Brooklyn, New York, a second daughter to Nathan and Celia Bader’s working class family, Ginsberg grew up in neighbourhood that largely comprised impoverished, working class Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants. Despite these difficulties, including her mother’s death, just a day before her graduation, she still managed to lead a personally and professionally satisfying life. She married in 1954, and has two, equally accomplished children.
Ginsberg attended Brooklyn’s P.S. 238 Elementary and James Madison High School, before going on to Cornell University, from where she graduated with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1945. She went on to Harvard law School between 1956 and 1958, and before she received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School in 1959. From 1959 to 1961, she served Hon. Edmund L. Palmieri, of US. District Court, for the Southern District Court of New York, during which time she was also called to the New York Bar. Once living Hon. Palmieri’s service, she took up a teaching job at Cornell University, as a research associate, before moving on to Rutgers University’s School of Law as an associate director/professor.
While at Rutgers, she helped launch the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for which she served as a General Counsel for nine years. She re-joined Columbia Law School as a Professor in 1972 (becoming the first woman ever to have been hired with tenure in this position), and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1975, before becoming a fellow at the Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences in 1977. The period between 1970 and 1980 was hugely important in shaping her professional career. During this time, she served on multiple legal committees/boards, and argued six cases before the Supreme Court in support of women’s rights.
President Carter nominated Ginsberg to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, in which role she remained until President Clinton’s 1993 nomination as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. Her early experiences and professional practice turned her into a radical, professorial feminist, way out of the mainstream. According to Hirschmann (1993), she shared in the belief that women have suffered mistreatment and oppression at the hands of men. Her legal writings identify her with radical feminists like Sarah Grimke and Simone de Beauvoir. Justice Ginsberg has ceerrtainly lived up to Hirschmann (1993)’s billing of a fiercely independent feminist. For instance, in Safford Unified School District v. Redding, Ginsberg is said to been particularly moved by the indignity and humiliation suffered by the plaintiff, who had sued her school for strip-searching her for allegedly hiding Ibuprofen. In other cases such as United States v. Virginia , 518 U.S. 515 (1996) and Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education , 544 U.S. 167 (2005), Ginsberg not only voted for, but strongly argued for equality, equal opportunity and women’s rights.
References
Cornell Legal Information Institute. (2014). Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Retrieved July 21, 2015, from https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/justices/ginsburg.bio.html
Hirschmann, S. (1993). Testimony Re: Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
National Women's Law Center. (2013). Justice Ginsburg’s Twenty Years on the Supreme Court. Washington, SC: National Women's Law Center.
Supreme Court of the United States. (2015). Biographies of Current Justices of the Supreme Court. Retrieved July 21, 2015, from http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx
