Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Quiet Revolutionary Who Changed American Law

Five Feet of Steel

She weighed barely a hundred pounds. She spoke so softly that lawyers had to lean forward to hear her questions from the bench. She dressed in judicial robes and lace collars, did twenty push-ups a day, and went to the opera on Saturday nights.

She also, over a career spanning half a century, did more to dismantle legal gender discrimination in the United States than any other single person. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020) was a lawyer, a professor, a Supreme Court justice, an icon, and a profoundly Jewish figure who saw the pursuit of justice as both a constitutional mandate and a religious obligation.

When she died at eighty-seven, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — rabbis across America noted the significance. In Jewish tradition, a person who dies on Rosh Hashanah is considered a tzaddik — a righteous person. For millions, the designation was self-evident.

Brooklyn and the Making of a Mind

Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Nathan and Celia Bader, the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria. The family was working-class. Nathan ran a fur business. Celia, who had been denied her own education so that her brother could attend college, poured her ambition into her younger daughter.

(Ruth’s older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at age six — a loss the family rarely discussed.)

Celia taught Ruth two things: “Be a lady, and be independent.” The first meant controlling her temper. The second meant depending on no one. Celia died of cancer the day before Ruth’s high school graduation. Ruth did not attend the ceremony.

She went to Cornell, where she met Martin (Marty) Ginsburg — a classmate who was, in her words, “the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain.” They married in 1954 and built one of the great partnerships in American public life: Ruth was serious, meticulous, and restrained; Marty was gregarious, funny, and a spectacular cook. He supported her career with absolute dedication for fifty-six years, until his death in 2010.

Harvard, Columbia, and the Closed Doors

Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956 — one of nine women in a class of over five hundred. The dean asked the women to justify taking spots that could have gone to men. (She did not dignify the question with an answer she would later repeat.)

When Marty got a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia Law School, where she tied for first in her class. Despite her record, no law firm in New York would hire her. She was a woman, a Jew, and a mother — three strikes in the legal world of the early 1960s.

She found her calling instead in academia and advocacy. As a professor at Rutgers and then Columbia, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and began a systematic campaign to challenge gender-based discrimination in the courts.

The Strategy of Slow Change

Ginsburg’s legal strategy was brilliant in its patience. Rather than challenging gender discrimination head-on — which might have produced backlash — she chose cases where men were the victims of sex-based legal distinctions. If a law gave benefits to widows but not widowers, for example, she challenged it on behalf of the widower.

This approach forced the all-male Supreme Court to see gender discrimination from a perspective they could relate to. Case by case, she built a legal framework that applied the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to gender — a principle that had never been firmly established.

Between 1971 and 1978, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five. She did not shout. She did not pound the table. She presented facts, cited precedent, and spoke in a quiet, measured voice that carried the force of irrefutable logic.

The Supreme Court

In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. She was confirmed 96-3 — a margin of bipartisan support that would be unimaginable today.

On the Court, she was initially a moderate liberal — a consensus builder who worked across ideological lines. As the Court shifted rightward, she became its most prominent liberal voice, and her dissenting opinions became legendary.

Her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007) — a case about pay discrimination — was read from the bench with controlled fury. She called on Congress to fix the problem, and Congress did: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became the first bill signed by President Obama in 2009.

The Notorious RBG

In 2013, at age eighty, Ginsburg became an improbable pop culture icon. After her passionate dissent in Shelby County v. Holder (which gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act), a law student created a Tumblr blog called “Notorious R.B.G.” — a play on the rapper Notorious B.I.G.

The blog went viral. Suddenly, the diminutive octogenarian justice was on T-shirts, coffee mugs, Halloween costumes, and tattoos. She appeared in a documentary, an SNL sketch (played by Kate McKinnon), and a Hollywood biopic. She embraced the fame with wry amusement, noting that she and Biggie had one thing in common: “We were both born and bred in Brooklyn, New York.”

Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue

Ginsburg’s Jewish identity was quiet but deep. She kept a poster of Deuteronomy 16:20 in her chambers — “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” — “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” She spoke about the connection between her legal work and Jewish ethics, about the obligation to repair the world (tikkun olam), and about the Jewish tradition of arguing — vigorously, respectfully, without personal malice — as the path to truth.

She died on September 18, 2020 — the eve of Rosh Hashanah. She was eighty-seven. Her body lay in state at the U.S. Capitol — the first woman and the first Jewish person to receive that honor. Thousands of mourners filed past, many leaving notes, flowers, and stones on the steps of the Supreme Court.

Her legacy is the law she changed and the example she set: that quiet persistence, moral clarity, and an unshakeable commitment to equality can, over a lifetime, transform a nation. As she once said, quoting her own mother’s advice: “It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” She meant it as a principle for marriage, but it applies equally to the pursuit of justice.