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Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Cornell University in 1954 and that year married Martin Ginsburg, a classmate. She enrolled at Harvard Law School, but after her husband found employment with a New York City law firm, she transferred to Columbia University, where she graduated tied for first in her class in 1959. That year she accepted a two-year clerkship for U.S. District Court Judge Edmund L. Palmieri in New York. After working on the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure from 1961 to 1963, Ginsburg accepted a post as a law professor at Rutgers University, where she taught until 1972. She also served as volunteer counsel to the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). At the ACLU, Ginsburg litigated sex discrimination cases and cofounded the Women's Rights Project. Ironically, during her time at Rutgers she became pregnant with her son, James, and because she was not tenured, she concealed her pregnancy with oversized clothes. In 1972 Ginsburg accepted a position at Columbia University, the law school's first woman with the rank of full professor.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived at the Harvard Law School as a student without any sort of agenda. But her early commitment to women's rights and equality was perhaps forged when the dean of the law school asked her and her eight female classmates why they were taking up seats at the school that rightly should be occupied by men. If that were not enough, she was unable to win a clerkship for a U.S. Supreme Court justice because of her gender, and she did not receive a job offer from the New York City firm where she clerked during the summer before her final year in law school. Then, after she took a teaching position at the Rutgers University Law School, she discovered that she was being paid less than male colleagues with the same rank.

These circumstances motivated Ginsburg's preoccupation with civil rights generally and the rights of women in particular. During her academic years, when she also served as counsel for the ACLU, she took on a number of sex discrimination cases with a view to seeing gender equality afforded the same protections as racial equality under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In such cases as Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), she argued that gender discrimination should be reviewed by the courts under the same strict scrutiny standard (the most stringent standard of judicial review used by U.S. courts) as race discrimination. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), she successfully argued that a provision of the Social Security Act denying widower fathers benefits provided to widow mothers discriminated against working women, since their Social Security taxes accrued fewer family benefits than those paid on behalf of working men. She also argued that the act denied men an opportunity equal to that of women to care for their children. In Turner v. Department of Employment Security (1975), she persuaded the Court to strike down a Utah law that made pregnant women ineligible for unemployment benefits. As a result of these and other cases, Ginsburg and the Women's Rights Project laid the groundwork for the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.

In 1980 President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg as a justice on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to replace Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ginsburg's reputation as a moderate on the U.S. Court of Appeals was helpful to her confirmation. In her years on the Supreme Court, her written decisions in numerous key cases made her a leading voice in the judicial branch for sex equality, thus expanding the rights of the American public, including both women and men.

References:

1. Baldwin, Louis. Women of Strength: Biographies of 106 Who Have Excelled in Traditionally Male Fields, a.d. 61 to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996.

2. Campbell, Amy Leigh. Raising the Bar: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ACLU Women's Rights Project. Princeton, N.J.: Xlibris Corporation, 2003.

3. Perry, Barbara A. "The Supremes": Essays on the Current Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: P. Lang, 1999.

4. Tushman, Clare, ed. Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Rights: Milestones to Equality. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001.

5. Urofsky, Melvin I. Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006.

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