Ruth Bader Ginsburg (15 March 1933-18 September 2020) was an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 10 August 1993 to 18 September 2020, succeeding Byron White and preceding Amy Coney Barrett.
Biography[]
Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1933 to parents of Ukrainian-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish heritage. Involved in Jewish cultural organizations during her youth, she was one of nine women in a class of about 500 men when she enrolled at Harvard in 1956. When her husband took a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia and was tied for first in her class on her graduation in 1959. She dealt with widespread sexism during her early law career, but she became a professor at Rutgers Law School in 1963, teaching there until 1972. That year, she founded the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, winning legal victories which discouraged legislatures from treating men and women differently under the law. President Jimmy Carter nominated her to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on 14 April 1980 to succeed Harold Leventhal, and she served until 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated her to the US Supreme Court. She was known as a liberal dissenter and for refusing to retire, and she was popularly nicknamed "The Notorious R.B.G." as a reference to the legendary New York rapper "The Notorious B.I.G.". She died of pancreatic cancer in 2020, just two months before the 2020 presidential election.