Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Dedicated Crusader For Women's Equality
Her unending, focused dedication to justice and equality has helped to clear a path for the rest of us.
Last year, I shared my intent to occasionally diverge from my legal technology posts and launch an intermittent blog series focused on the women Supreme Court justices. I began with a blog post about Justice Sandra Day O’Connor last August, and fully intended to write about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg within a month or two.
Now, here I sit — a full eight months later — struggling to write this post about Justice Ginsburg. Truth be told, I’ve dragged my feet on this deliberately, in large part out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to write a post that does her justice. And, given the limitations inherent to the medium of blogging, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll be able provide, at best, only a cursory overview of her impactful work, much of which I only became aware of after reading Sisters In Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor And Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (affiliate link). Since I can’t begin to provide an in-depth perspective on her work, I’ll summarize a few themes that jumped out at me while researching her career and background for this post.
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Like many others, I’ve long admired Justice Ginsburg from afar; after all, not only was she the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, she’s an internet phenomenon who inspired her very own meme. But it wasn’t until I began to learn more about her impressive career path that I had a true understanding of the far-reaching effects of her lifelong dedication to ensuring equal rights for women.
For example, from 1971 to 1980, she was the chief litigator for the Women’s Rights Project, where she argued six Supreme Court cases focused on women’s rights, prevailing in five of them. From the very start, Justice Ginsburg was passionate about forwarding the cause of equal rights for women, asserting that sex is a suspect class and thus subject to strict scrutiny review.
At the heart of her arguments about women’s equality over the years was the belief that the laws that purported to “protect” women by treating them differently than men in fact served only to hold women back and perpetuate gender inequality.
She first raised the strict scrutiny argument (unsuccessfully) in Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), where the concept that laws that purportedly “protected” women had the opposite effect was set forth in the Joint Reply Brief submitted on behalf of the appellants and amicus curiae in that case:
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For women who want to exercise options that do not fit within stereotypical notions of what is proper for a female, women who do not want to be “protected” but do want to develop their individual potential without artificial constraints, classifications reinforcing traditional male-female roles are hardly “benign.”
A few years later, in 1975, during oral argument before the Supreme Court in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636, she reiterated this concept concisely, stating, “A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”
Another important theme that emerged from Justice Ginsburg’s writing and speeches over the years is her steadfast belief that the inclusion of women in positions of power betters society as a whole. During a speech she gave at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 2006, she described this concept as follows: “(I)t is also true that women, like persons of different racial groups and ethnic origins, contribute what the Fifth Circuit Judge Alvin Robin described as ‘a distinctive medley of views influenced by differences in biology, cultural impact, and life experience.’ Our system of justice is surely richer for the diversity of background and experience of its judges. It was poorer when nearly all of its participants were cut from the same mold.”
In recent years, Justice Ginsburg has also doled out some very practical and enlightening advice on work/life balance and achieving success as a lawyer. She offered one tip that I found to be particularly resonant during a 2014 interview with Katie Couric: “You can’t have it all, all at once. Who — man or woman — has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough… And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me.”
These are undoubtedly words of wisdom that will withstand the test of time from a jurist who is a continual source of inspiration. Although Justice Ginsburg has spent much of her career working towards equality for women, what truly sets her apart is her sharp intellect, her passion for her work, and her compassion for the plight of those who are treated unfairly due to innate characteristics that are outside of their control.
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At the heart of it, that’s what I find most admirable: that her unending, focused dedication to justice and equality has helped to clear a path for the rest of us. For that, I couldn’t be more grateful.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.