Justice  /  Obituary

The Glorious RBG

I learned, while writing about her, that her precision disguised her warmth.

One reason Ginsburg might have been reluctant to retire is that like many women of her generation, it took so long for her to get a chance, and even longer for her to become the person she was supposed to be. She did not even begin to be a “flaming feminist litigator,” as she would later describe herself, until she was 37 years old. That year, 1970, she taught Rutgers’s first class on women and the law at the prodding of insurgent female law students, and took on the cases of women whose letters piled up at the local ACLU affiliate.

It was a neat intergenerational relay. If younger women pushed her to take less shit, the work of the women who came before her provided a blueprint. In a mere month of reading everything on women and the law at the library, she discovered that the law had for a century enshrined discrimination by treating it as a favor, the same thing she’d been told her whole life. In the next decade, she would co-found the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and embark on an audacious legal strategy to transform the constitutional understanding of gender.

Two visionary lawyers, the leftist feminist Dorothy Kenyon and the queer Black theorist Pauli Murray, had long argued that gender discrimination violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which had previously applied only to race. The Supreme Court had never agreed. It hadn’t budged much from its ruling a century earlier barring a woman from practicing law because, per one justice, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” In her second brief to the Supreme Court, 1973’s Frontiero v. Richardson, Ginsburg would coolly observe that “the method of communication between the Creator and the jurist is never disclosed.”

Her very first brief, two years earlier in Reed v. Reed, hadn’t just cited Kenyon and Murray; Ginsburg listed them as co-authors. When fellow ACLU lawyer Burt Neuborne objected that that just wasn’t done, Ginsburg said she didn’t care. “Women generations before said the same things my generation was saying, but they did so at a time when no one, or precious few, were prepared to listen,” she later explained. Though often treated as singular, Ginsburg never stopped calling herself lucky. “I had great good fortune in my life to be alive and have the skills of a lawyer when the women’s movement was revived in the United States,” she told me.