REMEMBERING JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

REMEMBERING JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

©Wendell Griffen, 2020

September 20, 2020

 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), transitioned to life beyond us the evening of September 18.  Justice Ginsburg lived a long, remarkable life devoted to serving victims of discrimination and bigotry, based on sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.  She was the first female editor of the Harvard Law Review, the first female tenured law professor at Columbia Law School and was one of the first lawyers who litigated sex discrimination cases before SCOTUS.  Justice Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court for 27 years, from August 10, 1993 until her death. 

 

I first learned of Ginsburg in 1971 as a University of Arkansas political science major in a course titled “The Supreme Court and Civil Rights.”  Our class learned that an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg was challenging discrimination based on sex much like Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP challenged racial discrimination a generation earlier.   

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg captured my attention again, in 1978, when I studied employment discrimination in law school.  Then-Professor Ginsburg had been teaching law school courses on gender discrimination.  She had also successfully argued cases before SCOTUS involving claims that the equal protection guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits sex-based discrimination.  Given her impressive professional accomplishments, it was no surprise when President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 and when President William Jefferson Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993. 

 

I admired Justice Ginsburg.  Others have expressed admiration for her tenacious intelligence and persistence in the face of blatant discrimination.  Her courage in the face of adversities  – the death of her only sibling during childhood, the death of her mother the day before Ginsburg was to graduate from high school at the top of her class, her husband’s diagnosis and bout with cancer while they were students at Harvard Law School, her experiences with blatant sex discrimination before becoming a lawyer and as a law professor, and her own experience with cancer – was astounding. 

 

In 2007, Justice Ginsburg joined Aretha Franklin in receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania during the same commencement ceremony when our elder son, Martyn, received his undergraduate degree.  Last September (2019) it was a treat to be in the audience while Justice Ginsburg was interviewed by National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg and introduced by President Clinton in a packed North Little Rock event arena.  No other jurist could have attracted such an audience.  No other jurist has become a cultural icon.

 

Justice Ginsburg was more than a tenacious, brilliant intellect or a successful attorney and law professor.  She was more than an erudite federal judge whose rulings (including her dissenting opinions) challenged patriarchy the same way that Justice Thurgood Marshall’s rulings challenged white supremacy.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg was iconic, akin to the biblical Old Testament prophets. 

 

Like Huldah, the prophet who explained the ethical meaning of sacred writings to King Josiah in the Old Testament, Justice Ginsburg explained the moral, social, ethical, and legal imperatives of the U.S. Constitution.  She exposed the truth, that US society is corrupted by white male privilege.  Her advocacy, scholarship, and court rulings created opportunities for oppressed people to break loose from state-sanctioned and sponsored injustice.  And she reprimanded her Supreme Court colleagues for holding views about government based on racism, sexism, and bigotry funded by greed and maintained by violence.   

 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a prophet, lived and worked among us.  We should mark her passing with grateful hearts.  We should comfort her loved ones and cherish her memory.  We should say “Thank you” and ‘Well done.”  And we should honor her memory by continuing her quest for justice for victims of bigotry, discrimination, and systems of oppression. 

 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg blessed our lives.  May her name be written in the Book of Life.