TIME Ruth Bader Ginsburg

ON MARCH 15, 2019, LEGIONS OF RUTH BADER Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses across the country. This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court Justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the 5-ft. tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. Some 19 months later, her iron will and gritty determination were no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Sept. 18, 2020, at age 87, of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released that day by the Supreme Court. In the early 1970s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism,…

THE FIRST TIME I MET RUTH BADER GINSBURG WAS on a Sunday evening in June of 1993 when she came to see me at the White House residence. She was on a final list of three people I was considering for an appointment to the Supreme Court, all of whom were excellent candidates. I knew this was one of the most important decisions I would make in my presidency, and I had reviewed dozens of candidates and carefully studied their records. Hillary and many other people I trusted had told me I should take a serious look at Judge Ginsburg because she was a brilliant woman with a compelling life story whose record on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was interesting, independent and progressive.…

JUNE 27, 1950, SHOULD HAVE BEEN A DAY OF triumph for an ambitious young girl just turned 17—the culmination of four years of outstanding academic achievement. It was graduation day at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, and Ruth Bader had been chosen as just one of four students to speak for her 800 classmates. Instead, it was a moment of great anguish. Two days before, Ruth’s mother, Celia, had succumbed to cancer. It had been a painful, four-year struggle, and for the sensitive adolescent, watching the physical deterioration of the parent who represented nurture and security, along with her father’s silent grief, had been wrenching. Yet with Celia’s encouragement, Ruth had won prestigious college scholarships, played in the school orchestra and cheered on the football team as a baton twirler—never once…

“It was that 10 years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about—I don’t say women’s rights—I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.” —RBG, 2010 RBG DIDN’T EAT ON THE MORNING OF JAN. 17, 1973. She was afraid she would vomit. Wearing her mother’s pin and earrings, like a soldier suiting up for battle RBG stood alone in front of nine stone-faced men and asked them to do something they had until then refused to do: recognize that the Constitution banned sex discrimination. She began her oral argument the same way all attorneys appearing in front of the Supreme Court do: “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.” You can listen to the recording of RBG speaking, how at first…

Amicus views this case as kin to Reed v. Reed 404 U.S. The legislative judgment in both derives from the same stereotype. The man is or should be the independent partner in a marital unit. The woman with an occasional exception is dependent, sheltered from breadwinning experience…. By employing the sex criterion, identically situated persons are treated differently. The married serviceman gets benefits for himself, as well as his spouse regardless of her income. The married servicewoman is denied medical care for her spouse and quarter’s allowance for herself as well as her spouse even if, as in this case, she supplies over two thirds the support of the marital unit. For these reasons, amicus believes that the sex-related means employed by Congress fails to meet the rationality standard. It…

TIME’s news feature, “The Law According to Ruth: Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” appeared in the June 28, 1993, edition of the magazine. It has been edited for space and clarity. IN 1993, AFTER PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON NOMInated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be the 107th Supreme Court Justice, the two stood side by side in the Rose Garden to make the announcement. Clinton spoke first, and when he passed the mic to Ginsburg, she noted how attitudes toward women lawyers had evolved since she graduated from Columbia Law. Though Ginsburg had finished No. 1 in her class, “not a single law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment,” she remembered. But were it not for those doors clicking softly shut, one after another, Ginsburg, 60, might not…