Tribune. Icon, heroine, historical figure, rockstar… There is no lack of qualifiers to pay homage to the one the Americans call “The Notorious“ RBG ””. Judge on the Supreme Court of the United States for twenty-seven years, unanimously respected for her rigor, her competence, her simplicity, her righteousness, her commitment to equal rights in an America more divided than ever, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is died on September 18 after a long fight against cancer which has never impaired her tireless capacity for work.
Symbolically, the date of his disappearance corresponds, to within a few days, to the hundredth anniversary of the 19e amendment of the US Constitution on women’s suffrage.
Iconic fate
His fate is emblematic. Of Ukrainian and Austrian descent, from a poor Jewish family dedicating her savings to financing her brother’s studies, she decided not to limit herself to being “Exclusively a good wife and a good mother”, according to the famous Bradwell v. Illinois Supreme Court of the United States validating, in 1873, the prohibition on women to exercise the legal profession. She resolutely followed the path her mother advised her, “The smartest woman I have ever known”, She told me the first time I met her the day after her appointment in 1993. “RBG” has cleared just about every obstacle in her path.
After a few years at Cornell University on a scholarship, she joined Harvard Law School, where nine students rubbed shoulders with 500 students, and completed her studies brilliantly at Columbia. It was all the same thanks to the insistence of her professor of constitutional law that she was recruited as clerk, the royal road of the best jurists, by a federal judge in New York who did not want to hear about a candidate who was at the same time a woman, a Jew and a mother of a young child …
But it was from 1963 as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] that its notoriety asserts itself. It is not given to every lawyer to plead before the Supreme Court, let alone a lawyer in her thirties. Out of six appeals involving equality between women and men, his pleadings were successful five times, notably in the case of “Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld ”of 1975, where she made it recognized that a man, in this case a widower, raising his children should benefit from the same tax advantages as those granted to women in this situation. After his appointment by Jimmy Carter as a judge of an appeal court, the consecration came, in 1993, of his appointment by Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court, approved by 96 senators, the chairman of the judicial commission being then Joe Biden .
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