5 Things To Know About Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Life

WASHINGTON, DC — In her 87 years of life, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made an indelible mark on the United States, its legal system and the millions of women in positions of power who followed in her footsteps.

Ginsburg died of complications of metastatic pancreas cancer Friday at her home in Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court confirmed in a statement.

Here are five things to know about RBG’s life:

1) Her real name was Joan Ruth Bader and she was born in Brooklyn.

Born on March 15, 1933, Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood. Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Odessa, Ukraine, who worked as a furrier at the height of the Depression, and her mother, born in New York to Austrian Jewish parents, worked in a garment factory.

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2) Ginsburg attended a male-dominated Harvard Law School.

As a first-year student at Harvard Law School in 1956 — she was one of only nine women in her 500-member class, and the first ever to serve on the Harvard Law Review — she was asked by a professor to justify taking the place in a rigorous acceptance process that might have gone to a man.

Later, despite having graduated at the top of her Columbia Law School class in 1959, Ginsburg was repeatedly passed over for jobs.

Eventually, one of Ginsburg’s Columbia professors explicitly refused to recommend any other graduates for clerkships until U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri hired her. She clerked for Palmieri for two years and then got a smattering of law firm offers, but turned them down because the salaries were much lower than for the men who were paid to do the same job.

3) Ginsburg led a lifelong fight against gender discrimination.

The "notorious RBG," as she was called, was only the second woman justice in U.S. history and the court's longest-serving female until her death.

Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She chipped away at discriminatory laws one case at a time, much as she had in the 1970s as the co-founder and director of the American Civil Liberties Union's influential Women's Rights Project.

Ginsburg nudged women ahead not through sweeping changes but in specific cases of gender discrimination that sent powerful messages to state legislatures on what's allowed under the Constitution and what isn't.

4) Ginsburg’s husband was the “first boy who cared that she had a brain.”

She graduated at the top of her class at Cornell University in 1954, the same year she married Martin "Marty" Ginsburg, "the first boy I knew who cared that I had a brain," Ginsburg said in a 2014 interview with Katie Couric.

Marty died in 2010. He served not only as her chef, putting his famed culinary skills to work on meals, but also curated a morning reading list of newspaper clippings.

"I miss him every morning," Ginsburg said in the early 2019 interview.

5) Ginsburg's death date has significance in the Jewish community.

Ginsburg died on the first of the Jewish High Holy Days, which lead to Yom Kippur, a time when Jews focus their attention on repentance and reflection of action. Friday also marked the start of Jewish Sabbath and the first night of Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year.

The timing of Ginsburg's death has special meaning in the Jewish community and has brought comfort to some of her supporters.

"According to Jewish tradition, a person who dies on Rosh Hashanah, which began tonight, is a tzaddik, a person of great righteousness," book critic Ruth Franklin tweeted soon after the news of Ginsburg's death broke.

NPR reporter Nina Totenberg explained also elaborated on the tradition: "A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish new year are the ones God has held back until the last moment bc they were needed most & were the most righteous."

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