Happy Birthday to inspirational thought leader and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. March 15, 1933, in New York City, NY), who dedicated much of her career to fighting for women’s rights. She also directly broke down barriers for women in the legal profession long before her time as a Supreme Court justice, for example writing the brief in the 1971 Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed. This was twenty-two years before she joined the Supreme Court. In a 1975 interview, she reflected on Reed v. Reed (1971), which she emphasized was “The first case in which the Supreme Court responded to a woman’s complaint of sex discrimination under the Constitution.” Ginsberg explained: “It was a very simple legal issue; the statute stated that when two persons were related to a decedent in the same degree, and both wanted to be appointed administrator of the estate, and one was female and the other male, the male had to be preferred to the female. Almost anyone would recognize that the statute was discriminatory, and you might think it too obvious to yield a major precedent. However, it was tremendously significant in that it represented the first time ever in the history of the country that the Supreme Court had said yes to a woman; the first time the Court recognized women as victims of discrimination.”
Citations: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Women and the Law: A Dialogue with Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Women’s Studies Newsletter 5, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40042542; Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elaine Bucklo, “From Women’s Rights Advocate to Supreme Court Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Speaks,” Litigation 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23075493; Deborah Jones Merritt and David M. Lieberman, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Jurisprudence of Opportunity and Equality,” Columbia Law Review 104, no. 1 (January 2004): 39-40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4099346; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Foreword,” in Supreme Court Decisions and Women’s Rights: Milestones to Equality, ed. Clare Cushman (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, A Division of Congressional Quarterly, 2001), xi-xii, https://archive.org/details/supremecourtdeci00clar; “Chief Justice William Rehnquist Administers the Oath of Office to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Associate Supreme Court Justice,” photograph (Washington, D.C., August 10, 1993), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/131493872.
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