Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on 15 March 1933 and has been kicking ass ever since.
After she was demoted at her day job for daring to be married and pregnant in 1955, the tiny yet stalwart Bader Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard law school in 1956, one of nine women out of a class of almost 500 people. She was such a stellar student that, ovaries or not and a mother or not, she got a place on the the Harvard Law Review . When she transferred to Columbia Law School (because her husband got a job in New York City) she was on the Columbia Law Review, making her the first woman with two law reviews to her credit. She graduated Columbia Law School in 1959 … and discovered having a vagina was considered a disqualifies for getting a job worthy of her talents. In spite of “a strong recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter turned down Ginsburg for a clerkship position because of her gender.”
Happily, another legal eagle, Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was bullied by professor Professor Gerald Gunther into giving Ginsburg a clerkship even though she did not have a penis. She clerked for Palmieri from 1960-1962, leaving the position to go do research on Swedish civil procedure at Lund University.
She got a position as a professor at Rutgers School of Law in 1963; one of the few women in America who were teaching law. She was openly paid much less than her male colleagues, but she hung on even after daring to have a second child in 1965, and was given tenure in 1969. After getting tenure, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, “the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women’s rights” and having won the battle of I-Can-Teach-Law-Without-A-Y-Chromosome, Ginsburg left Rutgers to teach at at Columbia in 1972, “where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination.”
In 1972 she also co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), because she was sick of all the sexist bullshit she had to put up with. By the next year, Ginsburg was the general counsel of the ACLU as well as a professor at Columbia and a well-known women’s rights activist.
She taught at Columbia until 1980, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on 14 April of that year. She shone in the Court of Appeals for more than a dozen years, until President Bill Clinton nominated her for the Supreme Court on 14 June 14, 1993. Ginsburg was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3, even though she “refused to answer questions about her view on the constitutionality of some issues such as the death penalty as it was an issue that she might have to vote on if it came before the court” during the the confirmation hearings.
By the time Ginsburg took her seat in the SCOTUS on 10 August 1993, and she had been battling in the trenches for women’s and civil rights for more than 20 years and had earned the respect and admiration of millions. She was the only female justice on the Court for 15 years, until Justice Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in on 7 August 2009. As a member of the SCOTUS, Ginsburg continued to argue persuasively and vehemently regarding the constitutional rights for every American. She has also become an icon for the 3rd wave feminists and the subject of tumbler memes hailing her as The Notorious RBG.
Enraged by the Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Shana Knizhnik created an online tribute for the equally furious dissenter in that case: Justice Ginsburg. The “Notorious R.B.G.” Tumblr took off like a bobsled on ice. Soon Ginsburg heard about the Tumblr. She laughingly explained in an interview with this reporter that one of her law clerks told her about it. The clerk, she added, “also explained to me what ‘Notorious R.B.G.’ was a parody on.” Giggling while telling the story, she continued, “Well, my grandchildren love it, and I try to keep abreast of what’s on the Tumblr.” The Tumblr title is a reference to the late 300-pound rapper Notorious B.I.G., known as “Biggie,” whose lyrics are raunchy enough that it’s hard to find a printable line.
So far Ginsburg has come through to bouts with cancer (both colon and pancreatic) and need to have a stent put in after almost having a heart attack. She is still going strong, fighting the good fight, and I hope this is one of many more birthdays for this amazing Justice and defender of our constitutional freedoms!