Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-) is the second woman ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and a sharp-penned scriber of landscape-changing court decisions in the twenty-first century. She is one tough mother: during her studies at Harvard Law School, as one of nine women out of five hundred students, she cared for her two-year-old daughter and her cancer-stricken husband who was also in school with her. Bader took notes for both of them and typed his dictated papers, while also working on the Harvard Law Review. When her husband recovered and got a job at a New York firm, she transferred to Columbia Law School and graduated first in her class. That didn’t make it any easier for her to find a job; after all, she was still a woman. Thanks in part to affirmative action, she became Columbia Law School’s first female tenured professor. RBG, as she’s now affectionately known on the Internet, went on to clerk for a district judge and direct the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, arguing six landmark cases for gender equality before the Supreme Court. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed RBG to the Supreme Court. During her nomination process, she got wind that one of her law school classmates was telling everyone about her demeaning nickname in school, to which Ginsburg replied, “Better bitch than mouse.” In her twenty-two years and counting on the Supreme Court, she has been in the majority of two historic rulings: King v. Burwell, which upheld the Affordable Care Act, providing health care for all U.S. citizens; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Not bad for a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who, upon her arrival at Harvard Law School, had been asked by the dean why she thought she deserved to be there, taking a spot away from a more-deserving male.

Breaking legal ground for equality