Published: 21 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
RUTH BADER GINSBURG USED to instruct her clerks to get it right and keep it tight, so I’ll try to do the same. Only someone so stubborn and single-minded, someone so in love with the work, could have accomplished what she did — as a woman, survived discrimination and loss; as a lawyer, compelled the Constitution to recognise that women were people; as a justice, inspired millions of people in dissent.
(I asked her once in an interview what she had changed her mind about and she refused to answer. “I don’t dwell on that kind of question,” she said. “I really concentrate on what’s on my plate at the moment and do the very best I can.”)
What made her RBG would also enact the most tragic and sickening ironies of today.
The feminist with a fundamentally optimistic vision, who believed that people, especially men, could be better, might be soon replaced by the rankest misogynist. The litigator and jurist who long subordinated her own immediate desires to the good and legitimacy of institutions, who had preached that slow change would stave off backlash, lived long enough to see Trump and the Federalist Society tear off the Court’s thin veneer of legitimacy anyway.
In the 2013 voting-rights dissent that earned her the Notorious RBG nickname, Ginsburg offered an addendum to Martin Luther King Jr.’s suggestion that the arc of history eventually bent toward justice: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.” She was thus committed. Still, today she leaves the work not only unfinished but at risk of being undone.
Irin Carmon is co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
FULL STORY The glorious RBG (New York magazine)
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Ginsburg's death on Rosh Hashanah significant for some Jewish Americans (Jerusalem Post)
News of her death travelled quickly via social media and became a focal point in many New Year's services, religious leaders and observant Jews said
US Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg's death stokes looming succession battle (Haaretz)
RBG's death could dramatically alter the ideological balance of the court, moving it further to the right
Photo: Hundreds gathered in Washington to honour the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (AP/Cliff Owen)
