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Remembering RBG

By Kanika Ferency posted 09-28-2020 12:46

  

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, died on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87. RBG served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1993 until her death. In her later years on the bench, she became “notorious” for her passionate dissents.

Prior to her time as a popular dissenter, RBG was a legal pioneer of gender equality. After graduating at the top of her class at both Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School, she had difficulties securing a job because she was a woman. She eventually became a law professor at Rutgers Law School, teaching civil procedure. During her tenure, she gained notoriety after cofounding the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. In 1972 she cofounded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she was involved in a number of the cases that brought sex discrimination issues to the forefront.

Her most notable cases include

  • Reed v Reed, 404 US 71 (1971), which struck down a discriminatory Idaho law preferring males to females for appointment as administrators of estates;
  • Frontiero v Richardson, 411 US 677 (1973), which barred sex discrimination under the military’s policy of allowing service members to claim only wives as dependents for housing and medical benefits, but not husbands;
  • Weinberger v Wiesenfeld, 420 US 636 (1975), which struck gender-based distinctions for eligibility for survivors’ benefits under the Social Security Act; and
  • Craig v Boren, 429 US 190 (1976), which struck down gender classifications under an Oklahoma statute that prohibited the sale of non-intoxicating beer to males under the age of 21, but allowed women over the age 18 to purchase it.

Though these cases individually do not seem like big wins, “[h]er work had helped to usher in a feminist revolution that has changed the face of American families and expanded the possibilities for American women’s lives.”

With her death, there is another vacancy on the Supreme Court. Her replacement will have big shoes to fill.

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