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đ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Courtâs Feminist Icon, Is Dead at 87
âHer late-life rock stardom could not remotely have been predicted in June 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated the soft-spoken, 60-year-old judge, who prized collegiality and whose friendship with conservative colleagues on the federal appeals court where she had served for 13 years left some feminist leaders fretting privately that the president was making a mistake. Mr. Clinton chose her to succeed Justice Byron R. White, an appointee of President John F. Kennedy, who was retiring after 31 years. Her Senate confirmation seven weeks later, by a vote of 96 to 3, ended a drought in Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court that extended back to President Lyndon B. Johnsonâs nomination of Thurgood Marshall 26 years earlier.â
âThere was something fitting about that sequence, because Ruth Ginsburg was occasionally described as the Thurgood Marshall of the womenâs rights movement by those who remembered her days as a litigator and director of the Womenâs Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s.â
âThe analogy was based on her sense of strategy and careful selection of cases as she persuaded the all-male Supreme Court, one case at a time, to start recognizing the constitutional barrier against discrimination on the basis of sex. The young Thurgood Marshall had done much the same as the civil rights movementâs chief legal strategist in building the case against racial segregation.â
(New York Times)
đł Voting Rights Act
Ruth Bader Ginsburg authored the dissent to the Supreme Courtâs 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act:
The sad irony of todayâs decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective. The Court appears to believe that the VRAâs success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearÂance is no longer needed. With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself. The same assumptionâthat the problem could be solved when particular methods of voting discrimÂination are identified and eliminatedâwas indulged and proved wrong repeatedly prior to the VRAâs enactment. Unlike prior statutes, which singled out particular tests or devices, the VRA is grounded in Congressâ recognition of the âvariety and persistenceâ of measures designed to impair minority voting rights. In truth, the evolution of voting discrimÂination into more subtle second-generation barriers is powerful evidence that a remedy as effective as preclearÂance remains vital to protect minority voting rights and prevent backsliding.
đ Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life
De Hart reminds us of the sweep of Ginsburgâs feminist vision, which sought to change not only the law but also institutions and practices that constrained womenâs abilities to define their own paths. To change the law, Ginsburg realized, she would have to change public opinion, since the courts would take into account the actions of Congress and the executive branch.
đ„ RBG
A few write-ups of âRBGâ characterize the documentary as a love letter; it is certainly that, which takes nothing away from its lively production and bright energy. I can think of few instances in which a cinematic profile of a judicial official could be correctly described as a sheer delight to watch.
đ My Own Words
In My Own Words, a collection of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's writings and speeches dating back to the eighth grade, the woman now known as "Notorious R.B.G." comes across not as the rock-star liberal jurist her adoring fans celebrate, but a cool cucumber in the white-hot world of Washington, a voice of reason speaking up for civilityâŠ
What emerges is not a portrait of a take-no-prisoners advocate but a strategic legal plotter who understands how to bring her audience around to her point of view.
Justice Ginsburg discussed her book at the Aspen Institute in 2017: