Who she was
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at Cornell, attended Harvard Law School and earned her law degree at Columbia. Before becoming a judge, she taught law at Rutgers and Columbia and helped lead the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project. Her career included teaching, representing clients and developing legal arguments against sex discrimination.
Supreme Court biographyShe became a federal appeals court judge in 1980. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court, where she was the second woman to serve. She remained a justice until her death in September 2020.
Supreme Court's September 18, 2020 announcementWhat her work changed
Challenging an automatic preference for men
In Reed v. Reed (1971), Idaho law gave men preference over equally entitled women seeking to administer an estate. Ginsburg was one of the lawyers named on Sally Reed's briefs. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that preference under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. She was an advocate in this case, not yet a justice deciding it.
Read the Reed v. Reed decisionRecognizing fathers as caregivers
Ginsburg also represented Stephen Wiesenfeld, a widowed father who was denied Social Security benefits available to widowed mothers. The successful challenge showed that laws built around assumptions about women's and men's family roles could harm either.
The ACLU's account of her advocacyOpening an educational opportunity
As a justice, Ginsburg wrote the Court's opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996). The Court held that excluding women from the educational opportunities offered by the public Virginia Military Institute denied equal protection. It also rejected the proposed separate women's program as an adequate remedy. The decision examined opportunity and individual ability rather than accepting broad assumptions about what women could do.
Read the United States v. Virginia decisionThese cases make her work concrete: who could take responsibility for an estate, receive support while raising a child, or pursue an education. Her career offers a way to explore how constitutional arguments can change rules that shape ordinary lives. That is a reason to study her work, not a claim that one person accomplished those changes alone.
Where you meet her in the novel
In Chapter 8, Protection from Self-Incrimination, a fictionalized Ginsburg emerges from The Living Constitution. Gary Gabel describes her in a black robe with a white lace collar and black-rimmed glasses. She takes Alex, Kali and Roman to an imagined Chicago courtroom and then above a construction project as they explore the Fifth Amendment. The encounter ends with their return to the library.
This is the novel's imagined encounter, not an event from Ginsburg's life or a transcript of her words. The historical cases above concern her real work on equality; they are not the cases witnessed by the children in Chapter 8.
A question to take into the chapter: What do the friends notice about how government decisions affect an individual person?
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Keep exploring
- Supreme Court biography
Education and judicial career.
- Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71
The original 1971 decision; a primary legal document, not a simplified explainer.
- United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515
The original 1996 decision, including the Court's opinion and separate opinions.
- Supreme Court memorial proceedings
Colleagues' recollections and further accounts of her career, read as a memorial rather than a neutral evaluation of every decision.