Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy Doesn't Start With the Supreme Court. She Made News Decades Earlier

[G_j]

https://time.com/5354990/ruth-bader-ginsburg-time/?fbclid=IwAR02a7ThWcfADVuGlIsXLyjl1OcgRiI9okcD6NCnQ1L5pjB-p6EgM55JDPw

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy Doesn't Start With the Supreme Court. Here's How She Made News Decades Earlier


Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York in 1972, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School. Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux


Today’s obituaries for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Sept. 18 at the age of 87 of complications from cancer, will inevitably and rightly describe her first and foremost as a Supreme Court Justice. Her distinguished legal career, however, began decades before her 1993 appointment to that bench.

Accordingly, her first appearance in the pages of TIME came decades earlier, in 1975, when she made the point that confusion and lack of understanding were the enemies of the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would prohibit the denial of civil rights on the basis of gender.

It was a point very much in keeping with her career up to that moment. After her 1959 graduation from law school, she quickly discovered that being a woman meant she could not get a job at a top New York City law firm. So, she decided to go another route, clerking for a district court judge and later teaching at Rutgers. From the beginning, defending equality — especially gender equality — proved to be her forte, in the courtroom and in her life. And during the ERA’s moment in the headlines, after its passage in 1972, she was a staunch public voice for the Constitutional Amendment.

Though it would not be ratified, Ginsburg herself saw great success during this period, as TIME explained in a profile following her Supreme Court nomination:

One of her cases successfully challenged a New Jersey regulation requiring pregnant teachers to quit without any right to return to the classroom. She had faked her way through her second pregnancy at Rutgers by wearing clothes one size too large during the spring semester and giving birth in the early fall before classes resumed. Rutgers gave her tenure in 1969. In 1971 Harvard, which had decided it was time to consider adding a female to the faculty, offered her a job teaching a course on women and the law. When a full-time offer was not forthcoming a year later, she quietly packed her bags. She was not unemployed for long. In 1972 Columbia Law School hired her as its first tenured female faculty member ever.

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[FBaggins]

1. Very true

But she was a force of historical proportions on the court. A giant in all but stature.

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. Yes, everyone watch the movies about her...true American hero and why righty hates her

[BootinUp]

3. im tellin you all she was a heeeroooo.

[MustLoveBeagles]

4. K&R

[SMC22307]

5. K&R