All Thinkers

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and Supreme Court Justice. She is widely seen as one of the most important legal advocates for gender equality in modern history. She was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family was Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe. They were not wealthy. Her mother Celia died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. She studied at Cornell University, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married in 1954. The marriage lasted 56 years. Marty Ginsburg was an extraordinary support to her career. He was a tax lawyer, a brilliant cook, and her closest friend. Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of over 500 men. She transferred to Columbia Law School to be with Marty in New York and graduated joint top of her class. Despite her record, she could not find a Supreme Court clerkship. Law firms often refused to hire her. She was, she later said, 'a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot'. She became a law professor at Rutgers, then Columbia. In 1972 she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As its head she argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. President Carter appointed her to a federal appeals court in 1980. President Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993. She served there for 27 years until her death from pancreatic cancer on 18 September 2020, aged 87. She was the second woman ever to serve on the Court.

Origin
United States
Lifespan
1933-2020
Era
20th-21st Century
Subjects
Law Gender Equality Civil Rights Constitutional Law Supreme Court
Skills
Critical Thinking Ethical Thinking Research Skills Problem Solving Cultural Heritage And Identity
Why They Matter

Ginsburg matters for three reasons. First, she changed American gender equality law. Before her work, the law in the United States treated men and women very differently. Women could be fired for becoming pregnant. Husbands could automatically receive benefits that wives could not. Women could not get credit cards in their own names without their husbands' permission. Ginsburg, working through the ACLU Women's Rights Project, designed a careful legal strategy to challenge these laws. She did not try to win everything at once. She picked specific cases, often involving men hurt by sex-based laws, to show male judges that gender discrimination harmed everyone. Her case-by-case method transformed the law over decades.

Second, she became a powerful voice on the Supreme Court for 27 years. She wrote major majority opinions, including the 1996 ruling that struck down male-only admissions at the Virginia Military Institute. She also became famous for her dissents, the opinions she wrote when the Court ruled against her position. Her dissents in cases on equal pay, voting rights, and the Affordable Care Act are studied as models of careful legal writing. She used dissents not just to disagree but to lay out arguments for future generations to use.

Third, she became a cultural figure, especially among younger Americans. In her late seventies, internet users began calling her the 'Notorious RBG', after the rapper Notorious B.I.G. She wore unusual lace collars on her judicial robes. Books, films, and Halloween costumes celebrated her. The fame had a serious purpose. It introduced young people, especially young women, to the patient legal work that builds rights over decades.

Key Ideas
1
Equal Protection for Women
2
Picking Male Plaintiffs
3
Marty: The Husband Who Made It Possible
Key Quotations
"Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."
— Frequently quoted; appears in many speeches and interviews
Ginsburg said versions of this line throughout her career. It captured her whole approach to legal change. Big victories rarely come at once. They come from chains of small, well-chosen victories built up over years. People who demand instant transformation often give up when it does not come. People who understand the step-by-step model keep working. For students, the line is encouraging. You do not have to change everything at once. You just have to keep taking the next right step. Across years, the steps add up to something major. This applies to legal work, but also to almost any long-term goal.
"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made."
— Speaking to law school audiences in many speeches
Ginsburg made versions of this point many times. Decisions get made in courtrooms, boardrooms, parliaments, and countless other places. For most of human history, women were excluded from most of these spaces. Their absence shaped what got decided and how. Ginsburg's case was simple. Women are full members of the human community. They belong wherever decisions are made. Not as exceptions or tokens, but as full participants. The point sounds obvious now. It was not obvious in 1971. For students, the line is a clear statement of a principle that took centuries to win and is still being worked out in many countries and many fields.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When discussing how rights are won over time
How to introduce
Ask students what rights they think women have always had. Many will be surprised to learn that until the 1970s in the United States, women could be paid less for the same work, fired for becoming pregnant, denied credit cards in their own names, and excluded from juries. Tell them about Ginsburg's role in changing all of this through patient legal cases. Rights are not given automatically. They are won, often slowly, by people who work for years.
Critical Thinking When teaching students about strategic thinking
How to introduce
Ginsburg did not try to win all gender equality at once. She picked one specific case, won it, used the precedent in the next case, and kept building. She also represented men in some cases to show that gender discrimination hurt everyone. Discuss with students: when is it useful to think in small steps rather than big leaps? Ginsburg's career is one of the clearest modern examples of careful long-term strategy. Many of the goals students will pursue in life will work the same way.
Ethical Thinking When discussing partnerships and equal sharing
How to introduce
Ginsburg's husband Marty did much of the cooking, took on much of the childcare, and treated her career as equally important to his. This was unusual for a man of his generation. Discuss with students: what does an equal partnership look like? Who does the cooking, the cleaning, the caregiving in the families they know? Are these distributed fairly? Ginsburg often said her career would not have been possible without Marty. Real partnership matters.
Further Reading

For a first introduction, the documentary RBG (2018) by Betsy West and Julie Cohen is widely available and gives a clear overview of her life and career. The fictional film On the Basis of Sex (2018) dramatises her early career, with creative additions that students should be aware of. Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik's Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2015) is readable and accessible. The American Civil Liberties Union website has substantial free material on her ACLU years.

Key Ideas
1
The Step-by-Step Strategy
2
United States v. Virginia (1996)
3
The Power of Dissent
Key Quotations
"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."
— Quoted by Ginsburg from the 19th-century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sarah Grimké, in her 1973 Frontiero v. Richardson oral argument
Ginsburg quoted this line from the 19th-century abolitionist Sarah Grimké in her first oral argument to the Supreme Court, in 1973. The line is striking. It refuses any plea for special treatment. Grimké, and Ginsburg quoting her a hundred years later, were not asking men to be generous to women. They were asking men to stop standing on women's necks. The metaphor of feet on necks was then, and is now, very physical. Equality, the line says, is the absence of suppression, not a gift. For intermediate students, the line is a useful contrast to softer arguments for women's rights. Ginsburg, like Grimké before her, was demanding the removal of an active oppression, not requesting a kindness.
"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."
— Speech at Radcliffe College, 2015
Ginsburg gave this advice at Radcliffe College in 2015. The two halves of the line matter equally. Fight for what matters. Do not stay silent. But also: think about how to bring others with you. A fight that alienates everyone except the already-convinced rarely changes anything. Effective work persuades people who started out unsure or even opposed. This was Ginsburg's whole career. She fought hard for women's rights. She won by speaking to all-male judges in language they could hear. She brought them along, case by case. For students, the line is a powerful counterweight to the modern style of online fighting that mostly preaches to the converted. Real change requires winning over the unconverted, and that requires care.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Critical Thinking When teaching students about the law and the Constitution
How to introduce
The American Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment says people must receive 'equal protection of the laws'. For nearly a hundred years, courts read this as applying mainly to race. Ginsburg's whole career was built on extending it to women. Discuss with students: how do words in old documents get applied to new situations? Does the meaning change? The Constitution was written in 1787-1791. Many issues it now governs were not imagined by its authors. Judges and lawyers still have to apply it. The work is harder than it sounds.
Ethical Thinking When discussing how to make change peacefully
How to introduce
Ginsburg achieved enormous change through legal cases, not protests or demonstrations. Her method was patient, careful, and based on convincing judges through arguments. Compare with Millicent Fawcett's peaceful suffragism in Britain. Both women worked through existing institutions rather than against them. Both made enormous progress over decades. Discuss with students: when does this kind of patient institutional work succeed? When does it fail? Both examples are useful for thinking about real social change.
Further Reading

For deeper reading, Jane Sherron De Hart's Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (2018) is a substantial scholarly biography. Ginsburg's own My Own Words (2016) gathers her speeches and writings. Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams's Conversations with RBG (2019) is a good interview-based volume. Linda Hirshman's Sisters in Law (2015) covers Ginsburg alongside Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court. For her ACLU years specifically, Amy Leigh Campbell's Raising the Bar (2004) is the major academic study.

Key Ideas
1
The 2014 Retirement Question
2
Notorious RBG and the Cultural Moment
3
What Ginsburg Got Wrong (and What She Got Right)
Key Quotations
"Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions."
— Interview with Nina Totenberg, NPR, 2002
Ginsburg explained her view of dissents in this interview. A dissent is not just a complaint. It is a statement aimed at future judges, lawyers, and citizens. Many of the great Supreme Court dissents of one era became the majority view of a later one. Justice Harlan's lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), arguing against racial segregation, became the basis for Brown v. Board of Education sixty years later. Ginsburg saw her own dissents in this tradition. Even when she lost a case, she could plant arguments that future generations would use. For advanced students, the line shows how serious legal thinking takes the long view. Today's losers can be tomorrow's winners. The work of dissenters keeps important arguments alive when the majority moves the wrong way.
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
— Statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera, dictated days before her death, September 2020
In her final days, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter. She was dying of cancer. President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate were threatening to fill her seat before the November 2020 election. Ginsburg had previously argued, when Republicans blocked Obama's 2016 nominee, that vacancies in election years should not be filled until after the election. Now she made a personal plea to be allowed the same treatment. The plea was ignored. Republicans confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to her seat days before the election. The episode was painful. It also showed how political power, not legal principle, often determines what happens in real Supreme Court appointments. For advanced students, the line is a useful corrective to the idea that the Court is purely a legal institution. It is also a political one, and Ginsburg's death made that visible.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Ethical Thinking When discussing how leaders make hard succession decisions
How to introduce
Tell students about Ginsburg's decision not to retire in 2014 when Obama could have replaced her. She believed she could keep working. She believed Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. Both beliefs turned out to be wrong. Trump won. Ginsburg died in 2020. Her replacement was Amy Coney Barrett, a justice with very different views. Discuss with students: what duties do people in long-term positions have to plan for their succession? When should personal commitment yield to strategic concern? Honest study of Ginsburg includes this difficult chapter. It does not erase her achievements; it does complicate the simple hero story.
Cultural Heritage and Identity When discussing how serious figures become popular icons
How to introduce
In her late seventies, Ginsburg unexpectedly became a popular cultural icon: the 'Notorious RBG'. T-shirts, mugs, films, Halloween costumes. The fame introduced millions of young people to legal history. It also sometimes simplified her into an inspirational figure rather than a working judge with specific legal positions. Discuss with students: when serious people become popular symbols, what is gained and what is lost? Ginsburg's case is part of a wider pattern of cultural simplification. The pattern applies to many other figures, including Mandela, Mother Teresa, Einstein, and others.
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Ginsburg was always a famous justice.

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What to teach instead

She was almost unknown to the general public for most of her career. Even after her 1993 Supreme Court appointment, she was a respected but quiet figure. Her fame as 'Notorious RBG' began in 2013, when she was already 80. The fame came late. The work had been going on for over forty years. People who only know the icon miss the slow, patient career that produced it.

Common misconception

Ginsburg was a radical liberal who fought for revolutionary change.

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What to teach instead

She was actually a careful, incremental thinker. She criticised the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision for going too fast and on the wrong constitutional grounds. She often built consensus rather than confrontation. She was friends with the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, despite their fierce disagreements on the bench. Her preferred method was step-by-step change, not revolution. Reading her as a radical misses what was actually distinctive about her: patience and strategic care.

Common misconception

Ginsburg single-handedly created modern American gender equality law.

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What to teach instead

She was crucial but not alone. Many other lawyers, including Pauli Murray, Dorothy Kenyon, Brenda Feigen, Susan Deller Ross, and others, contributed to the strategy and the cases. Murray's earlier writings were a central source for Ginsburg's arguments. Marshall's prior race-discrimination work was the model. Many plaintiffs took personal risks to bring the cases. Reducing the story to one person misses how legal change is actually made by communities of careful workers.

Common misconception

Ginsburg's decision not to retire was widely supported at the time.

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What to teach instead

Many liberal legal scholars publicly urged her to retire in 2013 and 2014, when President Obama could have appointed a successor. She refused. The criticism was real and contemporaneous, not just hindsight. Ginsburg herself acknowledged the question repeatedly. Some of her defenders later argued she was simply wrong about the 2016 election. Honest history acknowledges that the criticism was foreseeable, not invented after the fact. Even great judges can make serious strategic errors.

Intellectual Connections
Develops
Millicent Fawcett
Fawcett, the British Suffragist leader, used patient peaceful methods to win women's vote in Britain. Ginsburg, three generations later in the United States, used patient legal methods to win women's equal protection under the law. Both women worked through existing institutions rather than against them. Both took decades to achieve their goals. Both faced criticism for moving too slowly. Both proved that careful institutional work can produce huge change. Reading them together gives students two examples of strategic patience across very different settings.
Develops
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois helped found the NAACP, the organisation that led the legal fight against American racial segregation. Ginsburg modelled her gender equality strategy directly on the legal work that the NAACP did under Thurgood Marshall in the 1940s and 1950s. The case-by-case approach, the careful selection of plaintiffs, the building of precedent: all of this came from the Black civil rights tradition Du Bois helped found. Ginsburg openly acknowledged the debt. For students, the connection is useful for seeing how civil rights movements learn from each other.
In Dialogue With
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Crenshaw, the legal scholar who developed the concept of intersectionality, has been both an admirer and a critic of Ginsburg. Crenshaw's work shows how laws built around single categories (race or gender) often miss people who experience both at once. Ginsburg's gender equality cases mostly focused on white women's experiences and may not have addressed the specific struggles of women of colour. Reading them together gives students a more complete picture of American legal feminism. Both were necessary. Both have limits. Both contributed to where the law stands today.
Complements
Patricia Hill Collins
Collins, the sociologist who developed the matrix of domination, worked at the same time as Ginsburg in different fields. Collins focused on how race, class, and gender intersect in everyday life. Ginsburg focused on how courts handle gender discrimination. Together they offer two complementary approaches to understanding gender inequality. Collins' sociological vision is broader. Ginsburg's legal vision is sharper for specific cases. Reading them together helps students see how law and sociology can work on related questions.
In Dialogue With
Hannah Arendt
Arendt, the political philosopher, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who eventually came to the United States. Ginsburg, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, came of age in the same New York Jewish intellectual world Arendt eventually joined. Both women wrote about the importance of equal legal status for all members of a political community. Arendt was a theorist; Ginsburg was a practitioner. Both were shaped by the twentieth-century history of Jewish exclusion and the long fight for full citizenship. Reading them together gives students two angles on a shared concern.
Complements
Esther Duflo
Ginsburg and Duflo, in different fields, both used carefully designed methods to achieve change that was previously thought impossible. Duflo used randomised trials to identify which anti-poverty programs work. Ginsburg used carefully chosen test cases to identify which precedents would shift the law. Both methods rely on the patient accumulation of small, rigorous victories. Both were models of how serious technical work can change real lives. Reading them together gives students two contemporary examples of how women have used method and patience to transform their fields.
Further Reading

For research-level engagement, the briefs Ginsburg filed in her Supreme Court cases between 1971 and 1979 are available through legal databases and are extraordinary documents in their own right. Her Supreme Court opinions, especially United States v. Virginia (1996), Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), are essential. Linda Greenhouse's coverage of the Supreme Court for the New York Times across decades provides the journalistic record. Scott Dodson's edited volume The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2015) gathers academic essays on her career. The Notorious RBG academic literature is now substantial.