Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Joan Ruth Bader — associate justice of the United States Supreme Court and one of the architects of modern American sex-equality law, died at her home in Washington, D.C., on September 18, 2020, of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was eighty-seven. Born March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, she studied at Cornell and Columbia Law School, taught, and then led the ACLU Women’s Rights Project before President Jimmy Carter named her to the D.C. Circuit and President Bill Clinton elevated her to the Court in 1993 — the second woman appointed to that bench. As an advocate she dismantled statutes that treated women and men as legal strangers to one another’s rights: jury service, Social Security, military benefits, and the everyday scaffolding of citizenship. On the Court she wrote opinions and dissents that made equal protection a living vocabulary for sex discrimination, and she became, in later years, an unlikely popular figure whose lace jabot and quiet ferocity entered American civic folklore. Colleagues across ideology respected the precision of her craft even when they rejected her conclusions. Illness shadowed her final decade, yet she kept the work — arguments, opinions, public lectures — until the body would not. She was the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, a civic ritual that recognized how thoroughly she had rewritten the country’s legal map for half its population. She died in Washington on September 18, 2020. The cases remain assigned reading; the jabot remains a symbol; the fight she joined continues in every courtroom that still asks whether the law may sort people by sex. Ginsburg’s gift was incremental courage — changing the Constitution’s application one brief, one opinion, one dissent at a time. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 18 remembers the Brooklyn daughter who made equality a doctrine rather than a slogan.