The legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg runs on two tracks. As a lawyer in the 1970s, she persuaded the Supreme Court to treat sex discrimination as a constitutional problem under the Fourteenth Amendment. As a justice from 1993 until her death in 2020, she wrote majority opinions that still bind lower courts and dissents pointed enough that one of them became federal law. She was the second woman appointed to the Court, and few modern justices have combined that kind of legal influence with her level of public recognition.1Supreme Court of the United States. Biography of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Building Sex-Discrimination Law Before She Was a Judge
In 1971, Ginsburg helped found the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and served as its director. Her strategy was deliberate. She picked cases that would push the Court, one step at a time, to apply the Equal Protection Clause to laws that treated men and women differently.
The first win came in Reed v. Reed (1971), where she was principal author of the ACLU brief challenging an Idaho law that automatically preferred men over women as estate administrators. The Court struck the law down, the first time it had used the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to invalidate a sex-based statute.2Justia. Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971) The ruling was narrow, but it opened a door that had been sealed.
Two years later she argued Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) in person, challenging a military rule that gave spousal benefits automatically to the wives of male service members but forced female service members to prove their husbands were financially dependent. She asked the Court to treat sex as a suspect classification, the same heightened scrutiny applied to race. Quoting Sarah Grimké at argument, she said: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”3Supreme Court of the United States. Oral Argument Transcript, Frontiero v. Richardson The Court struck down the policy, though only a plurality agreed on treating sex as a suspect classification.4Justia. Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973)
A signature of this work was her willingness to represent male plaintiffs harmed by gender stereotypes. Showing judges that the same rules cut both ways made it easier to establish a general constitutional principle. By the time she left litigation, she had built the framework courts still use to test sex-based government rules.
The Majority Opinions That Defined Her Court Years
Her most consequential majority opinion was United States v. Virginia (1996), the challenge to the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute. Writing for a 7-1 Court, she held that VMI’s exclusion of women violated the Equal Protection Clause and that any government classification based on sex must be supported by an “exceedingly persuasive justification.”5Justia. United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996) She rejected Virginia’s argument that a separate program for women at a different school could satisfy the Constitution, writing that generalizations about the abilities or preferences of men and women could not justify excluding qualified individuals from a public institution. Lower courts still rely on the opinion whenever a government policy draws lines based on sex.
Two other majorities deserve attention. In Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), she wrote that the unjustified institutional isolation of people with disabilities is a form of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that states must provide services in the most integrated community setting appropriate to a person’s needs.6Justia. Olmstead v. L. C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999) The ruling became the foundation for decades of policy expanding community-based care.
In Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (2000), she held that citizens living near a polluted waterway had legal standing to sue over clean water violations even without proof of direct physical harm, so long as the pollution had deterred them from using the river.7Justia. Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167 (2000) That decision significantly broadened the practical reach of citizen suits enforcing environmental law.
The Dissents That Reshaped Law and Public Debate
Some of Ginsburg’s deepest influence came from opinions where she lost. Her dissents were written for future courts, and sometimes for Congress.
Ledbetter and the Fair Pay Act
In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), the majority ruled that employees had to file a pay-discrimination complaint within 180 days of the initial discriminatory decision, even if they only discovered the pay gap years later.8Justia. Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007) Ginsburg dissented, calling the ruling “out of tune with the realities of wage discrimination.” Pay disparities, she wrote, often grow in small increments over years, and employees rarely have access to coworkers’ salary information. Each paycheck reflecting the original decision, she argued, should restart the clock.
She read the dissent from the bench and openly invited Congress to act. Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, adopting the paycheck-reset rule she had advocated.9U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 It was the first bill President Obama signed into law and the clearest modern example of a Supreme Court dissent directly changing American law.
Shelby County v. Holder
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a 5-4 majority struck down the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which jurisdictions needed federal approval before changing their voting rules. Without that formula, the preclearance requirement in Section 5 became unenforceable.10Justia. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) Ginsburg’s dissent produced one of the most quoted lines in modern Supreme Court history: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” She argued that Congress had built an extensive factual record justifying continued oversight and that the Court should have deferred to that judgment.
Hobby Lobby
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), the majority held that closely held for-profit corporations could claim religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate.11Justia. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014) Ginsburg dissented, calling the decision one “of startling breadth” and warning the Court had “ventured into a minefield.” For-profit companies, she wrote, employ workers of many faiths, and recognizing the employer’s religious objection would deny contraceptive coverage to the women who needed it. She questioned where the Court would draw the line for religious objections to blood transfusions, vaccinations, or antidepressants.
Epic Systems
In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), the majority upheld mandatory arbitration clauses that prevent employees from bringing collective legal actions against employers. Ginsburg called the ruling an “egregiously wrong” reading of the interplay between federal labor law and the Federal Arbitration Act.12Justia. Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U.S. __ (2018) Employees, she wrote, need the ability to act collectively to counterbalance employer power, and the cost of pursuing individual claims often exceeds any potential recovery, leaving violations unremedied.
How She Thought About Judging
Ginsburg was an incrementalist. She believed the Court should move gradually, giving the political branches and the public time to absorb legal changes rather than imposing sweeping rulings that could provoke backlash. She sometimes pointed to Roe v. Wade as a decision that reached the right result but moved too far too fast. Her preferred approach was to decide cases on the narrowest grounds available and build precedent step by step.
She viewed the Constitution’s broad principles as evolving in application over time to include people originally excluded from its protections. The Fourteenth Amendment’s framers in 1868 were not thinking about women’s rights, but the text’s guarantee of equal protection logically extends to sex-based discrimination. The text stays the same; understanding of whom it protects grows.
She also drew on comparative law more than most colleagues. In a 2006 speech, she argued that the American judiciary “would be the poorer” if it failed to learn from foreign legal systems with shared democratic values, while making clear that foreign court decisions “set no binding precedent” for American judges.13Supreme Court of the United States. The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication The position drew criticism from colleagues who saw it as importing foreign law into American constitutional interpretation.
The Notorious RBG
In 2013, an NYU law student created a Tumblr blog called “Notorious R.B.G.,” a play on the name of the rapper the Notorious B.I.G. The blog was inspired by her Shelby County dissent, and it turned an 80-year-old judge into an internet phenomenon. Her image appeared on T-shirts, mugs, and Halloween costumes, and she leaned into the nickname with visible amusement.
Part of her public identity came from small, deliberate choices. When Sandra Day O’Connor joined the Court as the first female justice, the two decided the standard judicial robe, cut for a shirt collar and tie, needed something to mark a woman’s presence. Ginsburg began wearing decorative collars, called jabots, and eventually assigned specific collars to specific occasions. The “dissent collar” became a signal to Court watchers that she had something pointed to say.
Her friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite, became one of the Court’s most celebrated relationships. The two vacationed together and shared a love of opera, even as they clashed sharply on paper. An opera titled Scalia/Ginsburg was composed about their relationship. Whether that model of warm disagreement survived the broader polarization of American politics is an open question.
What Changed When She Died
Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87, from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer.1Supreme Court of the United States. Biography of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Her death weeks before a presidential election triggered an immediate political fight over her replacement. President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed on October 26, 2020, by a vote of 52 to 48.14Congress.gov. Nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court of the United States The confirmation shifted the Court’s ideological balance from a 5-4 conservative lean to a 6-3 conservative majority, a change that has shaped major rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and regulatory power in the years since.
Her precedents remain. United States v. Virginia still governs sex-based classifications. Olmstead still structures disability services law. The Fair Pay Act, born from her dissent, still controls how pay-discrimination claims are timed. Losing a case, she showed, is not the same as losing the argument.