John G. Malcolm & Elizabeth Slattery
...Long before she became a cultural icon, though, Ginsburg was a formidable force, a feminist trailblazer who inspired women across the ideological spectrum, and a towering individual–despite her diminutive stature–who commanded respect and admiration from all who knew her.
...Ginsburg’s jurisprudence also left a lot to be desired for conservatives. During a joint interview, Scalia once quipped about his dear friend, “What’s not to like–except her views on the law[?]”
Indeed, the bulk of Ginsburg’s work demonstrated a belief in a Supreme Court with seemingly limitless powers over society; a living, evolving Constitution that changes with the times; and laws that “enlarge or contract their scope as other changes … in the world, require
As we prepare for what may be the most contentious showdown over a Supreme Court vacancy in history, it is right that we take a moment to review the legacy of a giant in the legal profession: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, we shall not look upon her like again.
...Despite her outstanding academic record, and much like her contemporary Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg struggled to find employment upon graduation in 1959. She eventually landed a clerkship with Judge Edmund Palmieri, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and went on to teach at the Rutgers and Columbia law schools.
At the time, she was one of the few tenure-track female law professors in the country, and she eventually became the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, where her daughter Jane Ginsburg teaches today.
In 1972, Ginsburg started the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, where she devised a successful litigation strategy for advancing women’s rights in the law that both President Bill Clinton and Scalia aptly compared to the storied legacy of Thurgood Marshall in advancing the cause of African Americans.
She argued six sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five, including the landmark Reed v. Reed (1971) in which the court held that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
...During the Supreme Court argument, she declared, quoting abolitionist and suffragette Sarah Grimké: “I ask no favor for my sex. … All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
...Her career took a different turn in April 1980 when President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she would serve for 13 years. Following Justice Byron White’s retirement in the summer of 1993, Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 96-3, and Ginsburg became the second woman to serve on our nation’s highest court.
...On occasion, Ginsburg joined her conservative colleagues in various opinions. She often teamed up with Scalia and Thomas in the area of criminal law.
For example, she joined Scalia and Thomas in dissent from the court’s decision not to hear Jones v. United States (2014), involving the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, and she joined Scalia’s majority opinion in Kyllo v. United States (2001), finding that police use of a thermal-imaging device constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
In Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community (2014), Ginsburg joined Thomas, Scalia, and Alito in dissent over the court’s extension of tribal sovereign immunity to prohibit suits over a tribe’s commercial activities outside its territory. And she wrote for a unanimous court in Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005), upholding a federal law that bars the government from burdening prisoners’ religious exercise against an Establishment Clause challenge.
When Time magazine honored Ginsburg in 2015 by naming her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Scalia wrote that it was “apparent for all to see” that Ginsburg’s opinions were “always thoroughly considered, always carefully crafted and almost always correct (which is to say we sometimes disagree).”
But, Scalia added, “[w]hat only her colleagues know is that her suggestions improve the opinions the rest of us write, and that she is a source of collegiality and good judgment in all our work.”
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