“Notorious RBG”: Supreme Court Justice as Cultural Icon

    Case Study 3.3: “Notorious RBG”: Supreme Court Justice as Cultural Icon Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a most unlikely cultural icon. Her image—with owlish glasses and signature lace collars was plastered on Instagram and T-shirts (“Can’t Spell Truth Without Ruth”), tattooed on arms, and featured in Valentines and greeting cards. Some referred to her as “the notorious RBG,” drawing a humorous (and admiring) contrast between the diminutive Jewish grandmother in her 80s and the 300-pound dead rapper The Notorious B.I.G. Those who knew RBG were puzzled by her fame. Said one of her former clerks, “It’s hard for me to think of someone less likely to care about being a cult figure. I would not have thought of her as hip.”1 For decades she was dismissed by critics as dull and boring, a “schoolmarm” who was not a radical enough feminist. RBG’s popularity stemmed in large part from her dissents on the bench, making her a hero to many who objected to recent court rulings. Ginsburg was the most outspoken and prominent liberal on the panel, which has shifted to the conservative right. When the court struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act, in her dissent RBG defended the act as one of the most “justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history” and worried that discriminatory history would repeat itself.2 When the court denied a woman’s claim for equal pay on the basis that she had waited too long to sue, RBG declared, “the court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”3 Ginsburg’s life was marked by a series of passages, many of them extremely challenging. Her mother, the most inspirational person in her life, died the night before her high school graduation. She was one of only nine women to be enrolled in Harvard Law School. There the school dean asked her and the other female students how they could justify taking the place of a man. Her second year in law school, Ruth’s husband Marty came down with cancer. Ruth cared for Marty, typing up class notes for him while raising her infant daughter and taking her own classes. (She did well enough to earn a spot on the Harvard Law Review.) RBG transferred to Columbia University School of Law when Marty graduated and took a job in New York City. She graduated top of her Columbia class but struggled to find work because she was a Jewish woman with a young child. Ginsburg only got a federal court clerkship after one of her professors threatened never to recommend another clerk if she wasn’t hired. Shortly thereafter, she left her family to spend a year in Sweden studying that country’s legal system. In 1963, she became the second woman to be hired full-time at Rutgers Law School where she successfully sued the university for paying women less than men. (When hired, the dean told her she deserved low pay because her husband had “a very good job.”) Ginsburg then became the first tenured female law professor at Columbia. During this period, she also took on a new role, becoming director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. Later she served as a federal court judge and was only the second woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court. Her beloved husband Marty died of cancer in 2010. Over the years she battled pancreatic, colon, and lung cancer, enduring surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. RBG’s mission throughout her career was been to use the courts to include those left out by the framers of the Constitution—Indigenous peoples; minorities; individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer; and, particularly, women. She was first to offer a course on women and the law and compiled the first sex discrimination casebook. While at the Women’s Rights Project she argued and won a number of cases before the Supreme Court. She based her arguments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which granted women the same protections as men. Many called her the “Thurgood Marshall” of women’s rights. (Marshall led the legal fight for civil rights and was also appointed to the Supreme Court.) After becoming a federal judge, RBG wrote the majority opinion requiring the Virginia Military Institute to admit female cadets and continued to speak on women’s rights. As Supreme Court justice, she opposed limits on abortion, attempts by employers to deny contraceptive coverage to female employees, and restrictions on voting rights. She was the first Supreme Court justice to preside at a same- sex wedding. Ginsburg worked right up until her death in 2020, promoting equality under the law for as long as could. She worked out regularly with a trainer, kept a packed schedule, and rarely missed a court session. [Biographers marveled at RBG’s work ethic and her ability to function with only a couple of hours of sleep a night.] Following her death from cancer, Ginsburg was the first woman and person of Jewish ancestry to lie in state at the nation’s capital. Discussion Probes 1.Why do you think Justice Ginsburg was such a popular figure? 2.What qualities enabled RBG to grow from her life passages? 3.How do passages like those faced by Justice Ginsburg (if successfully navigated) promote character growth? 4.What character traits did RBG demonstrate? 5.How does RBG serve as a role model? What can we learn from her life that we can apply to our character development?