Path to the Supreme Court
Most justices are remembered for what they wrote from the bench. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the rare one whose deepest mark on American law was made standing in front of it. In the decade before she wore a robe she argued six sex-discrimination cases to an all-male Supreme Court and won five, and the doctrine those cases planted, that the Constitution's equal protection reaches the ancient legal architecture of men's and women's separate spheres, would have earned her a place in the reports if she had never been confirmed to anything. The parallel to Thurgood Marshall (§96), the advocate who dismantled a caste system case by case and then joined the Court he had persuaded, was drawn so often it hardened into a title; she handled it gingerly, and it fit anyway. The second act, twenty-seven years as a justice, ran from methodical majority-builder to the most famous dissenter in the world, and ended in the most consequential vacancy of the century. But the chapter has to begin where she said everything began.
Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1933, the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a furrier in the fur trade's dying years, and Celia Amster Bader, a reader by nature who had left school for a garment-district office at fifteen so her brother could go to college. The first daughter, Marilyn, died of meningitis at six, when Ruth was a toddler; the mother poured everything into the child who remained, the trips to the library above the Chinese restaurant, the discipline of composure, the two instructions the daughter repeated for the rest of her life: be a lady, and be independent. Celia developed cervical cancer while Ruth was at James Madison High School and died on June 25, 1950, the day before graduation; the honor student stayed home from the ceremony. At Cornell she finished as the highest-ranking woman in the class of 1954, studied European literature under Vladimir Nabokov, who rebuilt her prose sentence by sentence, and constitutional government under Robert Cushman, who set her against the McCarthy era's loyalty machinery and toward the law. She also met Martin Ginsburg, a sophomore with none of the era's anxieties about clever women; he was, she said later, the only young man she dated 'who cared that I had a brain.' They married in June 1954, a month after her graduation.
The apprentice years read now like a controlled experiment in American sexism. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Marty served his Army hitch, the local Social Security office demoted her when she disclosed her pregnancy. At Harvard Law School, where she enrolled in 1956 as one of nine women among more than five hundred men, Dean Erwin Griswold asked the women at a dinner why they were at the school 'taking the place of a man.' When Marty developed testicular cancer in their second year she attended his classes and her own, typed his papers, fed him, and made the law review; when he recovered and took a New York firm job she transferred to Columbia, made the law review there too, and tied for first in the class of 1959. It bought her nothing. No New York firm would hire her; Felix Frankfurter, offered the top of the Columbia class as a clerk, declined to take a woman. She reached a clerkship with Judge Edmund Palmieri of the Southern District of New York only because Professor Gerald Gunther guaranteed a male replacement if she failed and promised never to send Palmieri another clerk if he refused to try her. Then, almost accidentally, Sweden: recruited by Columbia's Project on International Procedure, she learned the language, spent research seasons in Lund, and co-wrote the standard English treatise on Swedish civil procedure, watching a country where women studied and practiced law in numbers unimaginable at home and asking why her own country could not manage it.
Rutgers hired her in 1963 and told her plainly she would be paid less because 'your husband has a very good job'; she joined the women faculty's equal-pay fight, and when she became pregnant with her son James in 1965 she hid it under her mother-in-law's clothes until the contract was signed. The New Jersey ACLU began referring her the complaints nobody wanted, teachers forced out for pregnancy, and the professor of Swedish procedure found her subject. In 1971 she wrote the brief in Reed v. Reed, which struck an Idaho law preferring men as estate administrators, the first time the Court ever voided a statute for discriminating against women, and she put Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray on the cover as co-authors, crediting the generation that had made the argument before anyone would listen. In 1972 Columbia made her its first tenured woman, and she co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project. The campaign that followed was Marshall's playbook adapted: incremental cases, sympathetic plaintiffs, and, her signature, male ones, chosen to teach nine men that sex lines cage both sexes. In Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), her first argument, she spoke without a single interruption and closed with Sarah Grimké's 1837 sentence: 'I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.' The Court ruled 8 to 1 for her Air Force lieutenant. Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), her favorite, won survivor's benefits for a young widower raising his son alone, unanimously; Craig v. Boren (1976), which she shaped as amicus, fixed the heightened standard of review; Duren v. Missouri (1979) closed the run. President Carter named her to the D.C. Circuit, and she was confirmed on June 18, 1980, six months before Carter's other professor-nominee, Stephen Breyer (§108), reached the First Circuit.
Thirteen years as a judge built a reputation that surprised her old allies: careful, incremental, procedurally strict, and famously fond of her sparring partner on the court, Antonin Scalia (§103). In a March 1993 lecture she even criticized Roe v. Wade's method, arguing that a narrower, equality-based ruling might have settled more and provoked less. When Byron White retired that spring, Marty, by then one of the country's leading tax lawyers and its most devoted judicial spouse, ran a quiet campaign; the president met her and, an aide said, fell for her 'hook, line and sinker.' In the Rose Garden on June 14, 1993, she closed with her mother: 'I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve, and daughters are cherished as much as sons.' The president behind her wiped his eyes. The Senate confirmed her 96 to 3 on August 3, 1993, and she took her seat on August 10: the second woman, and the first Jewish justice since Abe Fortas (§95).
On the Supreme Court
The capstone came in her third term. In United States v. Virginia (1996) she wrote for the Court that the Virginia Military Institute's all-male admissions violated equal protection, gathering her own precedents of the 1970s into a standard with teeth: 'Parties who seek to defend gender-based government action must demonstrate an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for that action.' 'Generalizations about "the way women are," estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.' The advocate had become the author; the campaign begun in Reed was constitutional law, in her hand. Her other majorities ran quieter and deep: Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), holding that the unjustified segregation of people with disabilities in institutions is discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, is often called the disability-rights movement's Brown v. Board, and a long line of procedure and civil-procedure opinions did the unglamorous work she prized. For a decade she was a minimalist among minimalists, the junior half, with Sandra Day O'Connor (§102), of the Court's first pair of women, and she described the terms after O'Connor retired, when she sat alone among eight men, as the loneliest of her tenure.
The second Ginsburg emerged as the Court moved right. In 2007 she read her Ledbetter v. Goodyear dissent from the bench, answering Samuel Alito's (§110) majority, which held that a woman underpaid for years had sued too late, with an instruction aimed past her colleagues: 'the ball is in Congress' court.' Congress caught it; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill President Obama signed. In 2013, when Shelby County v. Holder retired the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula, she answered the Chief Justice's (§109) 'Our country has changed' with the era's most quoted retort, comparing the majority's logic to 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.' Weeks later a law student named Shana Knizhnik started a Tumblr called Notorious R.B.G., and the eighty-year-old justice with the lace collars, the dissent jabot, the twice-weekly workouts, and the opera habit she shared with Scalia became something no Article III judge had ever been: a mass-culture icon, on tote bags and forearms, in documentaries and feature films. The celebrity had costs. In July 2016 she called the Republican nominee for president 'a faker' in interviews and then apologized, conceding that judges should not comment on candidates; critics on both sides marked it as the moment the icon crowded the judge.
By the Supreme Court Database's coding, as computed for this site, she cast a liberal vote in 60.4 percent of more than 2,200 cases against a 45.6 percent average for the colleagues who sat on the same cases, a gap of nearly fifteen points, the tenth most liberal record of the thirty-three justices the site's panel ranks, with a dissent rate of 20.0 percent concentrated in her final decade. The numbers trace exactly the arc the public saw: a consensus lawyer who became, in a Court that left her, its principal voice of objection.
The last decade was a public vigil she refused to treat as one. She survived colorectal cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009 without missing a day of argument; Marty died of cancer in June 2010, days after their fifty-sixth anniversary, leaving a note by his hospital bed telling her she was the only person he had ever loved, and she was on the bench the next morning, the term's final day, because, she said, he would have wanted it. When liberal academics urged her in 2013 and 2014 to retire while a Democratic Senate could confirm a successor, she asked who, exactly, such a Senate would confirm that she should prefer, and stayed, the deliberate opposite of the calculation Breyer (§108) would later make. Lung cancer came in 2018, and in January 2019 she missed oral arguments for the first time in twenty-five years; the pancreatic cancer returned in 2019 and she worked through it, participating in the Court's May 2020 telephone arguments from a hospital room. She died at home in Washington on September 18, 2020, at eighty-seven, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Days earlier, NPR reported, she had dictated a statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: 'My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.' President Trump publicly doubted the statement's provenance, suggesting Democratic leaders had written it; her family and NPR's reporting stood behind it; this chapter records both. The wish was not granted. Amy Coney Barrett (§115) was confirmed to the seat on October 26, 2020, eight days before the election, completing the sharpest reversal of a single seat since Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall, as the Barrett chapter (§115) records.
She lay in repose under the portico of the Court she had argued into a new understanding of the Constitution, and then in the Capitol, the first woman and the first Jewish American ever to lie in state there. The two careers can be argued against each other, the advocate's monument against the dissenter's celebrity, the incrementalist against the icon, and the timing of her endgame will be debated as long as the seat it produced keeps deciding cases. What is beyond argument is the before and after: she found the law of the sexes a closed room and left it a contested one, and she did much of it before she ever put on the robe. She was buried at Arlington beside Marty. She had served until the last day of her life.
The Voting Record
How Ginsburg voted in the 2,228 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1993 term through the 2019 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Ginsburg voted with Kagan more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 81.6% of their 365 divided cases — and with Thomas least, at 30.6%. See the matrices →Compared against the 12 colleagues Ginsburg shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Ginsburg ended 4.7 points more liberal relative to those colleagues than at the start — the 19th-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
United States v. Virginia
1996Holding · The state's exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute violates equal protection; sex-based classifications require an 'exceedingly persuasive justification.'
Role · Ginsburg wrote for the Court.
The capstone of the sex-equality revolution she had led as an advocate, near the high-water mark of constitutional protection against sex discrimination.
Read the opinion →Olmstead v. L.C.
1999Holding · Unjustified segregation of people with disabilities in institutions is discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act; community placement is required when appropriate, unopposed, and reasonably accommodable.
Role · Ginsburg wrote the principal opinion.
Often called the disability-rights movement's Brown v. Board; it moved hundreds of thousands of people from institutions into community care.
Read the opinion →Shelby County v. Holder
2013Holding · (Dissenting) Gutting the Voting Rights Act's coverage formula is like 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.'
Role · Ginsburg dissented from Chief Justice Roberts's (§109) majority.
Her most famous dissent, warning of the voting restrictions that would follow, and a founding text of the 'Notorious RBG' phenomenon.
Read the opinion →Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
2007Holding · (Dissenting) The majority's cramped reading of the deadline for pay-discrimination claims ignores how such discrimination actually works.
Role · Ginsburg read her dissent aloud from the bench and called on Congress to act.
Congress responded with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — a dissent that directly rewrote the law.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed American law twice — first as the lawyer who dismantled sex discrimination, then as the justice who became an unlikely cultural icon. As the architect of the ACLU Women's Rights Project in the 1970s she argued a series of cases before the Supreme Court that established, step by careful step, that the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection forbids discrimination on the basis of sex — a litigation campaign often compared to Thurgood Marshall's (§96) against segregation. Appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993, she wrote the Court's decision in United States v. Virginia, striking down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute and consolidating the constitutional revolution she had led as an advocate. In her later years, as the Court moved right, she became its most celebrated dissenter — the 'Notorious RBG' of Shelby County and Ledbetter — whose collars, workouts, and refusals to retire made her a phenomenon far beyond the law. She died in office in 2020, and the battle over her seat reshaped the Court. Jane De Hart's biography is the definitive life. Begin there, read the VMI opinion and the great Shelby County dissent, and hear Ginsburg in her own words.
The Bookshelf
The definitive biography, the product of years of research and interviews with Ginsburg herself. De Hart traces the Brooklyn childhood, the barriers of the 1950s legal world, the brilliant strategy of the 1970s litigation campaign, the years on the D.C. Circuit, and the Supreme Court tenure — connecting the advocate and the justice in a single arc. Thorough and authoritative, it is the fullest account of a life that reshaped the constitutional law of equality, and the essential starting point. Alfred A. Knopf.
The book that crystallized the phenomenon — an affectionate, illustrated life built from the Tumblr that made an octogenarian justice a pop-culture hero, blending the biography with her landmark dissents. The best guide to the 'Notorious RBG' and why she mattered beyond the law. Dey Street Books.
The intertwined story of the first two women on the Court — Hirshman on how the conservative O'Connor (§102) and the liberal Ginsburg, so different in method and temperament, together transformed the place of women in American law. Harper.
Two decades of interviews with Jeffrey Rosen, edited into a warm, wide-ranging portrait of her thinking on the Constitution, marriage, opera, and the craft of dissent — Ginsburg in her own measured voice. Henry Holt.
A collection of Ginsburg's own writings and speeches, spanning from childhood editorials to major opinions and dissents, with introductions by her authorized biographers. It gathers her reflections on gender, judging, the craft of the dissent, and the colleagues she admired across ideological lines — including her famous friendship with Scalia (§103). Warm, wry, and revealing, it is the most accessible way to hear Ginsburg's voice directly, and a fine companion to the fuller biography. Simon & Schuster.
The posthumously completed capstone — her writings, speeches, and a landmark 2019 conversation with the Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler on the equal-protection campaign she built as an advocate. The fullest single record of the litigation strategy that changed the Constitution. (Amy Leigh Campbell's Raise the Bar, 2003, documents the ACLU Women's Rights Project in detail.) University of California Press.
The opinion in which Ginsburg, as a justice, secured the principle she had spent a career building as an advocate. Striking down the Virginia Military Institute's exclusion of women, she held that sex-based classifications require an 'exceedingly persuasive justification' — a demanding standard that brought equal-protection law close to the goal her 1970s litigation had pursued. Measured and precise, it is both a landmark of sex-equality doctrine and the personal capstone of the movement she led. Read it as the moment the advocate's vision became the Court's command.
The dissent that made her a legend. When the Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act by striking its coverage formula, Ginsburg dissented with an image that swept across the country: throwing out the preclearance requirement because it had worked, she wrote, 'is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.' Impassioned and meticulously documented, it crystallized her late-career role as the conscience of the Court's liberal wing and helped launch the 'Notorious RBG' phenomenon. Read it as the model of the dissent as public argument.
The dissent that Congress enacted. When the Court threw out Lilly Ledbetter's pay-discrimination suit as filed too late, Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench — a rare move — and called on Congress to correct the Court. It did: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 was the first bill Barack Obama signed into law. The clearest proof that a dissent can become the law. Free online.
The major posthumous scholarly volume — Totenberg, Herma Hill Kay, Linda Kerber, the Siegels, and others assessing the advocate and the justice, updated after her death with a foreword by Justice Breyer. The scholarly counterweight to a shelf of popular biography. Cambridge University Press.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life — for the definitive account of advocate and justice alike
- 2.United States v. Virginia — for the opinion that vindicated her life's work
- 3.Shelby County v. Holder dissent — for the great dissent that made her an icon
- 4.Ginsburg, My Own Words — for her voice, wit, and craft directly
- 5.Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue — for the litigation campaign that changed the Constitution
Where the Papers Are Kept
Ginsburg's papers are held at the Library of Congress, encompassing both her pioneering career as a litigator and her years on the bench, and substantial portions have been opened to researchers — a rich record of the sex-equality campaign and the modern Court. Combined with the Blackmun (§98) and other collections at the Library, they make Washington's manuscript holdings a central resource for the study of her era. A major American judicial archive. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The advocate and the judge. Ginsburg is one of the few figures to have shaped a field of constitutional law first as a litigator and then as a justice, inviting comparison with Thurgood Marshall (§96). Study the continuity between the 1970s Women's Rights Project cases and her opinions on the bench, and ask what it means — for the law and for judicial independence — when a justice is asked to rule in the very area she once argued as a partisan.
- The dissent as public power. In her later years Ginsburg's dissents reached audiences far beyond the legal profession, and 'Notorious RBG' turned a justice into a cultural icon. Examine how she used the dissent as a form of public argument aimed at Congress and the country — the Ledbetter dissent helped spur a federal statute — and weigh what a justice gains, and what the Court's mystique risks, when a jurist becomes a celebrity.
- The choice not to retire. Ginsburg declined to step down during a friendly administration when her health was failing, and her death in 2020 allowed a swift conservative appointment that shifted the Court for a generation. Set her decision against the strategic-retirement calculations of other justices, and ask how the personal, the institutional, and the political should figure in a justice's judgment about when to leave — a question her example has made unavoidable. Seat lineage: Byron White §93 → Ruth Bader Ginsburg → Amy Coney Barrett §115.