Thank You Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Today, United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on the last day of the Jewish year, a date associated with righteousness. Fitting.

As a woman, I am grateful for Justice Ginsburg’s lifetime of advocacy in furtherance of gender equity. She founded the first law journal in the United States to focus exclusively on women's rights. She became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School. She co-wrote the first casebook on sex discrimination. She co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. She argued five gender discrimination cases successfully to the United States Supreme Court that furthered gender equity in the eyes of the law. She became the second female United States Supreme Court Justice, and authored the Court’s opinion in United States v. Virginia (VMI) and many others. She became Notorious RBG. America became more equal.

As as a female attorney, I am grateful for her and other women who attended law school in the first years those institutions would even have them, and opened the flood gates for others to follow. Harvard Law School first admitted female students in 1950. Justice Ginsburg enrolled six years later, along with eight other women in a class of roughly 500 men. She recalled the Dean asking these women “Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of a man?” She answered by achieving top grades, making law review, and graduating law school tied for first in her class at Columbia — she transferred. By the time I entered law school in 2009, roughly half of all law students were women. I am thankful to her and people like her who pursued their education despite institutional and social hostility, making my degree and treasured career more attainable.

As an employment attorney, I appreciate that even though this intellectual icon transcended most earthly law students in her academic achievements, I had an easier time getting my first law firm job. After a two year clerkship on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (she was rejected for a clerkship with a United States Supreme Court justice because of her gender), she could not find work at a law firm. She famously said of herself and the first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, “[b]ecause we didn’t have that route to travel we had to find another way.”

Justice Ginsburg, thank you. In your absence, the year ahead is hard to countenance, but using your example, we will find another way.