As the politics of her replacement begin to cloud the news of her passing, there remains much to celebrate in the life of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, regardless of one’s gender or party—from her reputed warmth as a person and civility as a colleague to her brilliance as a lawyer and justice of the Supreme Court. She will be remembered as a role model and fierce advocate for the rights of women, but her work had a broader purpose.
“Her goal was to persuade the court that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial discrimination but to sex discrimination as well,” writes longtime Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse in her Sept. 20 New York Times obituary.
Ginsburg saw that male and female were viewed in the law and beyond “as a natural duality,” Greenhouse writes, quoting a 2013 article by Ginsburg’s biographer, Wendy Williams. The prevailing legal framework “treated women like yin and men like yang and either rewarded them for their compliance with sex-appropriate role behavior or punished them for deviation from it.” Ginsburg’s project was to free both sexes, says Greenhouse.
That project began with her leadership of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU in the 1970s and continued through her 27-year term as a Supreme Court justice, where she contributed to a range of decisions that broadened the rights of both men and women. In a 1975 case, Ginsburg successfully argued that widowed men were equally entitled to receive childcare welfare payments on the death of a spouse, and in a landmark 7-1 Supreme Court ruling, she wrote the majority opinion that required the tax-supported Virginia Military Institute to admit qualified women.
Among her speeches, interviews, and opinions as a public figure, lawyer, and justice, there are surely some that are anathema to conservatives and a few disquieting to liberals. But Ginsburg will be remembered most for helping the court recognize that many assumptions imbedded in the law regarding the roles of men and women in society were anachronistic, that “official distinctions based on sex deserved ‘heightened scrutiny,’” as the court ruled in a 1976 case she had helped prepare.
According to former law clerk Prof. Neil S. Siegel of Duke Law School—whom Greenhouse quotes—when an adoring visitor once told Ginsburg that all her feminist girlfriends loved her for the work she had done on behalf of American women, the justice is said to have replied that she hoped the visitor’s male friends loved her as well.
They should. Over her long career, she brought the court and society closer to fulfilling the promise of the 14th amendment of the Constitution—ratified more than 150 years ago in 1868— that no citizen, male or female, would be denied the “equal protection of the laws.” For those who believe in that promise, her passing is an occasion for mourning and for gratitude.
