Judge, born in New York City, New York, USA. She studied law at Harvard and earned her JD at Columbia Law School (1959). She taught at Rutgers University Law School (196372) and Columbia University Law School (197280), and was a circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals for Washington, DC (198093). She led the Women's Rights Project while at Columbia and won several important cases before the Supreme Court during the 1970s. Nominated and confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court (1993), she was the second woman (after Sandra Day O'Connor) to sit on the nation's highest bench.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg|
|
|
|
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Term in office |
|
|---|---|
| August 10, 1993 – present | |
| Preceded by | Byron White |
| Succeeded by | Incumbent |
| Nominated by | Bill Clinton |
| Born |
March 15, 1933 Brooklyn, New York |
Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg (born March 15, 1933) is an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ginsburg attended James Madison High School and Cornell University before graduating from Columbia University Law School in 1957.
Following work as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959-1961, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, and a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law (Newark) from 1963-1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972-1980, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school case book to be written on sex discrimination.
She was the chief litigator of the ACLU's women's rights project and argued in front of the Supreme Court several times, winning cases overturning laws that reinforced gender inequity and attaining a reputation as an extremely skilled oral advocate and equality litigator. She was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and was nominated by President Clinton as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on June 14, 1993.
Early life
Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader. Ginsburg (later a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and an internationally prominent tax lawyer) in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. Her husband accepted a job in New York City and she transferred to Columbia Law School, where she won a spot on the law review, becoming the first person ever to have been on law review at both Harvard and Columbia. From 1961-1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, for which she learned Swedish in order to co-author a book on judicial procedure in Sweden. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law (Newark) from 1963-1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972-1980, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school case book to be written on sex discrimination. She was the chief litigator of the ACLU's women's rights project and argued in front of the Supreme Court several times, winning cases that rejected laws that reinforced gender inequity and attaining a reputation as an extremely skilled oral advocate and equality litigator.
Judicial career
Ginsburg was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980. During her subsequent confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, she refused to answer questions regarding her personal views on most issues or how she would adjudicate certain hypothetical situations as a Supreme Court Justice.
During her service on both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has generally been regarded as a liberal judge. Ginsburg has urged a cautious approach to adjudication, arguing in a speech given shortly before her nomination to the Supreme Court that "[m]easured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication.
Though Ginsburg has consistently supported abortion rights and joined in the Supreme Court's opinion striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law in Stenberg v. She has also been an advocate for references to foreign law and norms in judicial opinions, in contrast to the textualist views of her colleague Justice Antonin Scalia.
In September 2005, amidst speculation that a woman would replace retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg told the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that she felt "any woman would not do", and that she had a list of names which she did not expect the President to read.
She is considered to be part of the "liberal wing" in the current court and has a Segal-Cover score of 0.680 placing her as the most liberal (by that measure) of current justices, although more moderate than those of many other post-War justices. In a 2003 statistical analysis of Supreme Court voting patterns, Ginsburg emerged the second most liberal member of the Court (behind Justice Stevens).
Some notable cases in which Ginsburg wrote an opinion:
United States v. Ashcroft Court OpinionDispute over relevance of international law
On March 1, 2005, in the case of Roper v.
Justice Antonin Scalia rejected that approach with strident criticism, saying that the justices' personal opinions and the opinions of "like-minded foreigners" should not be given a role in helping interpret the Constitution.
Ginsburg rejected that argument in a speech given about one month after Roper. "Judges in the United States are free to consult all manner of commentary," she said to several hundred lawyers, scholars, and other members of the American Society of International Law.
In response to Roper and other recent decisions, several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution declaring that the "meaning of the Constitution of the United States should not be based on judgments, laws, or pronouncements of foreign institutions unless such foreign judgments, laws or pronouncements inform an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution of the United States." "The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification," Ginsburg asserted.
Sleeping controversy
On March 1, 2006, while the high court was hearing arguments in the cases of League of United Latin American Citizens v.
"Ginsburg Precedent"
Over a decade passed between the time Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were appointed and the time another justice left the court. Republicans used an argument that they called the "Ginsburg Precedent", which centered on Ginsburg's confirmation hearings.
In a September 28, 2005 speech at Wake Forest University Ginsburg said that Chief Justice Roberts refusing to answer questions on some cases was "unquestionably right."
Democrats had argued against Roberts' refusal to answer certain questions, saying that Ginsburg had made her views very clear, even if she did not comment on all specific matters, and that due to her lengthy tenure as a judge, many of her legal opinions were already available for review.
During the John Roberts confirmation hearings, Biden, Hatch, and Roberts himself brought up Ginsburg's hearings several times as they argued over how many questions she answered and how many Roberts was expected to answer.
User Comments Add a comment…