American lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday, September 18, at the age of 87 from pancreatic cancer in her Washington home. The second woman in US history to sit on the Supreme Court, she tirelessly championed gender equality.
“RBG” is gone and the American left has lost its icon. By far the best known of the judges of the country’s highest legal body, she was adored by progressives and hated by conservatives.
Joan Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish family that quickly abandoned the use of her first name, considered too common at the time. Deprived of university because of her gender, she is encouraged to continue her studies by her mother, who died of cancer while her daughter is still in high school. Brilliant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Cornell University, a member of the prestigious Ivy League club, where she met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg. Then she entered Harvard Law School. It is then an almost exclusively male bastion whose dean asks the rare women admitted why they come to take “The place of a competent man”.
Glass ceiling
After going through Columbia Law School in New York to follow her husband, Ruth Bader Ginsburg embarked on a university career where she never ceases to encounter a glass ceiling linked to her gender. A stay in Sweden, a more progressive country, allowed him to sharpen his convictions. Back in the United States, in 1970 she founded the first legal journal devoted exclusively to women’s rights. Two years later, she helped launch a similar section within the powerful American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Her determination as a warrior is manifested in a series of victories before the Supreme Court in cases of discrimination linked to gender. She carefully chooses cases which show that such discrimination can also penalize men.
In April 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter established his burgeoning reputation with an appointment to the prestigious District of Columbia Court of Appeal, considered an antechamber to the Supreme Court. She wins the respect of the conservative judge Antonin Scalia, who precedes her within the highest legal body in the country. Their common passion for opera and the culinary talents of Martin Ginsburg will be at the origin of a long friendship despite their deep philosophical differences.
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