My Own Words

From her childhood, Ginsburg recognized the reality of gender inequity as well as other forms of inequality. Her biographers write, “[F]rom a young age, Ruth also resented what she saw as sometimes rigid adherence to seemingly hypocritical rules and the inferior role assigned to women” (15). At age 13, when Ginsburg penned articles not only for her school newspaper but also for the Jewish community’s newsletter, she found herself excluded from the bar mitzvah ceremony that the 13-year-old Jewish boys participated in as a rite of passage. Her acute awareness of the misuse of power came to the fore during her college matriculation, when she challenged the prevailing, popular use of wiretapping, the newest tech tool, conducted without legal warrants. In a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun, she wrote: “[I]n our system of justice, the presumption of innocence is prime, and the law cannot apply one rule to Joe who is a good man, and another to John, who is a hardened criminal” (23). During her time at Cornell, studying under constitutional scholar Robert Cushman, her career focus fell onto social justice when Cushman challenged Ginsburg to pursue the law.

Ginsburg’s early area of legal expertise was procedural law. As a result, she became well acquainted with the history of jurisprudence, acquiring not only an encyclopedic knowledge of the US federal and state judicial systems but also a purview of how other nations conduct the rule of law. Spending time in Sweden to study an entirely new set of domestic laws, Ginsburg encountered the concept of vägmärken, meaning “waypaving” or “pathmarking.” Applying this concept historically, she recognized women who came before her who sought to establish social and legal pathways to gender equality. While teaching procedural law as a professor at Rutgers, Ginsburg made her first noteworthy legal challenge against gender inequality when she wrote a brief for Reed v. Reed, a case in which a state law arbitrarily chose a man rather than a woman to dispose of a deceased son’s belongings. Ginsburg’s brief made it to the Supreme Court, the first of 24 briefs written by Ginsburg dealing primarily with gender inequity that the justices would read.

As the legal momentum built around needed revisions of laws and constitutional interpretations, Ginsburg expanded the base of her support. Moving to Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman law professor, with the aid of the ACLU, she founded the Woman’s Rights Project in 1972. Ginsburg notes in several comments throughout the text that the women’s movement, while never as dangerous or controversial as the civil rights movement, learned valuable lessons from those pursuing civil rights that came into play in the struggle for gender equality. In 1973, for the first time Ginsburg personally argued a case before the Supreme Court. She would participate in oral arguments before the court five more times before President Carter nominated her to join the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Even as sitting judge, and later as a justice, Ginsburg never lost her fervor for seeking gender equality. As she said to the Senate Judicial Committee prior to her confirmation hearings, “[W]e could not have come to this point—and I surely would not be in this room today—without the determined efforts of men and women who kept dreams of equal citizenship alive in days when few would listen” (183). Accordingly, Ginsburg said that, as a justice, one moment of great satisfaction came when she read the bench announcement proclaiming that the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) could no longer exclude women students. Despite her many legal victories and the concurrent social changes, she expresses the recognition that gender equality remains an unfulfilled aspiration.