Gothamist
A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.
Gothamist
Listen Live
News
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Brooklyn Native Turned Supreme Court Justice And Liberal Icon, Dies At 87
By
Jen Chung
Published Sep 18, 2020
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Never miss a story
Email address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .
Mary Altaffer/AP/Shutterstock
By
Jen Chung
Published Sep 18, 2020
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
We rely on your support to make local news available to all
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who led the fight for gender equality as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and became the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died on Friday. The Supreme Court said Ginsburg passed away from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by her family.
"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice."
President Donald Trump apparently learned of her death while leaving rally in Minnesota, telling reporters, "Wow, I didn’t know that, you're telling me now for the first time... She led an amazing life. Whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life." He later said in a statement, "Our nation mourns the loss of a titan of the law... Her opinions, including well-known decisions regarding the legal quality of women and the disabled, have inspired all Americans, and generation of great legal minds."
A "nasty and tumultuous political battle" over Ginsburg's seat on the court will likely begin, as she was part of the liberal four-person minority. Senate Majority Mitch McConnell has promised on Friday evening that President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made his feelings clear in a tweet following her death.
Ginsburg, according to NPR, dictated a statement to her granddaughter recently, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
In response to her death, Governor Andrew Cuomo, issued the following statement on Twitter: "NY’s heart breaks with the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. During her extraordinary career, this Brooklyn native broke barriers & the letters RBG took on new meaning—as battle cry & inspiration. Her legal mind & dedication to justice leave an indelible mark on America."
Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the country had "lost an incomparable icon. A daughter of Brooklyn."
The mayor ordered all flags, which are currently already at half-staff in memory of those who died from COVID-19, to continue to be flown at half-staff in honor of the late Justice.
Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader in 1933, and grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn, the daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant father and a mother whose parents were Austrian Jewish immigrants. She grew up in Flatbush and later moved to Midwood. She attended P.S. 238 and James Madison High School— where her yearbook noted she was a member of the orchestra, a cheerleader, a baton twirler, and a feature term editor at the school newspaper.
However, SCOTUSblog writes, "she did not attend her high school graduation in June 1950. Her mother, who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer right around the time that Ginsburg began ninth grade, died two days before the ceremony."
At Cornell University, Ginsburg studied literature under Vladimir Nabokov and sparked an interest in the First and Fifth Amendments while researching the Hollywood black list for Professor Robert Cushman. She also met her future husband, Marty Ginsburg, there; during an interview in 2014, she said he "was the first guy I ever dated who cared that I had a brain.”
After she graduated in 1954, they married and moved to Oklahoma, where Marty Ginsburg served in the military. NPR reports, "There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job. Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that 'should go to a man.'" When she started, her daughter Jane was only a little over a year old.
She eventually transferred to Columbia Law School—her husband, a year ahead in law school, survived a cancer diagnosis and got a job in New York—where she graduated and tied for first in her class. When she taught at Rutgers Law School from 1963 to 1972, she realized that her salary was lower than her male colleagues, one of many slights based on her sex that would spur her to change society and law.
As the ACLU explained, "Prompted by her own experiences, Ginsburg began to handle sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ginsburg envisioned that men and women would 'create new traditions by their actions, if artificial barriers are removed, and avenues of opportunity held open to them.' The ACLU Women's Rights Project was born in 1972 under Ginsburg's leadership, in order to remove these barriers and open these opportunities."
She returned to Columbia Law School in 1972, becoming the first female tenured faculty member, while still fighting for gender equality.
She made a series of arguments in the 1970s in front of the Supreme Court. In 1973, arguing about benefits for a female military member's dependent husband; in 1976, she argued that women should not be allowed to purchase beer at 18 when men could only purchase it at 21:
"Her litigation strategy invited comparison to that of Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was the architect of the civil rights movement’s incremental legal attack on racial discrimination before he joined the court," according to the NY Times. In an obituary for New York Magazine, Irin Carmon explained:
Before she became a justice, Ginsburg once corrected a dinner guest who spoke of her work on behalf of women’s liberation; in fact, she said, it was women’s and men’s liberation.
It was a holistic framework that was as bold as it was optimistic. And it was literally true, because throughout the 1970s, she’d brought cases on behalf of women barred from participating in public and economic life and men whose desire to be caregivers for their child or parent was similarly unrecognized. She already lived that reality she already lived at home where, her daughter Jane once said, Daddy did the cooking and Mommy did the thinking.
President Jimmy Carter nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., in 1980, where she served until her nomination in 1993 by President Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court. During the Rose Garden announcement of her nomination, Ginsburg said, "I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons."
She was confirmed by the Senate, 96 yeas to three nays, with one non-vote.
The New Yorker detailed her "unlikely path" to the country's highest court on the 25th anniversary of her term, noting, "Before she became a hero to feminists, she had to overcome their distrust."
NPR notes, "Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases."
She also authored the majority opinion that struck down racial gerrymandering as well as one that allowed women to attend Virginia Military Institute, in what would be considered a landmark case.
“The genius of this Constitution is that, over the course of now more than two centuries, ‘we the people’ has become more and more inclusive,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “So it includes people whose ancestors were held in human bondage. It includes Native Americans, who were not part of [the original 1789] ‘we the people.'"
In her older years, Ginsburg became a pop culture icon and feminist hero, with people calling her the "Notorious RBG," which was also the name of a documentary about her (there was also a film, starring Felicity Jones, about her 1970s Supreme Court cases, On The Basis Of Sex). Ginsburg delighted in engaging a new generation of admirers, frequently giving talks, even while battling cancer.
She also officiated the marriage of Shana Knizhik, who created the "Notorious RBG" and now works as a Legal Aid attorney in New York City.
When asked in 2015 about how she would like to be remembered, Ginsburg said, "Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability and to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something... outside myself. I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid."
Tagged
supreme court
brooklyn
ruth bader ginsburg
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
MORE news
Mamdani launches new team to help NYers keep SNAP, Medicaid benefits
Nearly 1 million in the city risk losing benefits as a result of new federal restrictions.
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Oct 19, 2026 at 12:43 p.m. ET
Riders at 53rd St. station where man was fatally shot say they worry about gun violence
A 26-year-old died after being shot on the platform at the Midtown station. Commuters are rattled.
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
News
Riders at 53rd St. station where man was fatally shot say they worry about gun violence
A 26-year-old died after being shot on the platform at the Midtown station. Commuters are rattled.
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
These are the NYC neighborhoods that will get free 2-K next fall
By
Karen Yi
Early Addition: Get to know Wanda, the donkey in the Met's 'La Bohème'
By
James Ramsay
Eric Adams' NYC buildings boss Eric Ulrich heads to trial, 3 years after arrest
By
David Brand
and
Samantha Max
Never miss a story
Catch up on the most important headlines with a roundup of essential NYC stories, delivered to your inbox daily.
Sign upEmail address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .