#and she STILL risked her entire life for neil to protect her son

[ionlydrinkhotwater]

Nora said it was an arranged marriage between her and Nathan. What haunts me is: how old she was when she was forced to get got married?

mary was only around 21 when she had neil. she was barely an adult. i need to be sedated.

[murdermanager]

1. F'D UP

1. F'D UP

Priya Hubbard and Jessica Borges invite their friend Keith over for rosé to tell him about their in-depth investigation of one of the biggest crime lab scandals of the century

2. Ouija Broads

Strange women talking about stranger things. Tales from the Pacific Northweird.

3. The Officer's Wife

In April 2016, hours after an argument with his wife Jessica, Griffin, Georgia police officer Matthew Boynton radios for assistance and reports hearing two gunshots coming from inside his home. Officers rush to the scene to find Jessica Boynton inside a locked closet, with an apparent gunshot wound to her head. Underneath her body, officers find her husband's service weapon. But this story of small-town romance gone wrong was far from over. The investigation into what really happened inside that closet and what happened next would captivate a small town and change the lives of one family forever. The Officer's Wife is a VAULT Studios production in collaboration with 11Alive in Atlanta.

4. Your Own Backyard

A documentary podcast series investigating the 1996 disappearance of Cal Poly student, Kristin Smart.

5. Resolved Mysteries

Eliza, Karlin & Alison update & RE-solve all of the segments from the 90's TV show Unsolved Mysteries. Watch along with us as we uncover the latest information on all of the segments in everyone’s favorite mystery show. We laugh, we cry, we drink cheap wine and we want justice! Follow us on Facebook & Twitter @resolvethepod and IG @re_solvedmysteries

6. To Live and Die in LA

In Feb 2018, an aspiring actress vanished from her Hollywood apartment. Rolling Stone journalist Neil Strauss was asked to help the family get answers. Together, they found them...sometimes at great personal risk. For the first time in a serial podcast, go inside a gripping multi-state investigation as it unfolds from the moment of the disappearance to each twist and turn in the case. Stay not only more informed than the news, but listen as the official story is dismantled with in-the-moment first-hand reporting with the leading figures in the investigation. The new #1 podcast from the team behind Up & Vanished and Atlanta Monster.

7. Chasing Cosby

For nearly half a century, Bill Cosby brought warmth and laughter into hearts across the country, cementing his image as “America’s Dad.” But he also led a dark, secret life preying on women. The comedian carefully coaxed each one into feeling safe and cared for, then left them to pick up the pieces of their lives. It all started with Andrea Constand. She carried the burden of being the only one of the 60-plus accusers whose case could be tried in a court of law. Now, she's telling her side of the story, along with firsthand accounts from more than a dozen survivors, jurors and prosecutors. From the Los Angeles Times, and hosted by investigative reporter Nicki Weisensee Egan, "Chasing Cosby" is the definitive take of the rise and fall of Bill Cosby. New episodes released every Tuesday.

8. The Catch and Kill

For the past two years, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ronan Farrow has been following a trail of clues from his investigation of Harvey Weinstein to other blockbuster stories about the systems that protect powerful men accused of terrible crimes in Hollywood, Washington, and beyond. But he didn’t bring that information to light on his own. A compelling cast of sources—from brave whistleblowers to shadowy undercover operatives—decided the fate of these investigations, sometimes risking everything in the process. The Catch and Kill Podcast brings you their stories, in their own words, for the first time.

9. Sick

What happens after a doctor uses his own sperm to impregnate his patients?

Sick is an investigative podcast about what goes wrong in the places meant to keep us healthy. Award-winning journalists Jake Harper and Lauren Bavis dig deep to share shocking personal stories of medical injustices, and hold accountable the people and institutions meant to care for us.

Sick's first season explores the complications of fertility medicine, one Indiana doctor’s abuse of power, and the generations of lives he affected.

10. Room 20

The sign above his hospital bed called him Sixty-Six Garage. For more than 15 years, he would lay there unidentified and unconscious. Or so, everyone believed. From L.A. Times Studios and the team that brought you “Dirty John” and “Man in the Window,” comes “Room 20,” a story about the search for a man’s identity and the truth about his accident. Investigative reporter Joanne Faryon’s two-year journey is filled with twists and turns. Now, she'll finally reveal who Garage really is. But one important question remained for her upon this discovery: has Garage been conscious this entire time? This series was produced by L.A. Times Studios with support from Neon Hum Media.

11. Bardstown

Welcome signs proclaim it “America’s Most Beautiful Small Town.” It’s considered the Bourbon Capital of the World. And in many ways, Bardstown, Kentucky is just like a lot of small, tight-knit communities all across the country. But just under the surface, there’s something darker. Not everyone wants to talk about it. And a lot of people would rather forget. That’s because since 2013, Bardstown has also been the site of five unsolved murders. Now, the team behind “Bomber,” “True Crime Chronicles,” and “88 Days” is digging into these cases to find out what’s really happening in Bardstown, and whether these murders could be related. And along the way uncovering a history of violence and fear in this otherwise quintessential southern town. Bardstown launches August 28.

12. Down The Hill

Abby and Libby - 2 young girls murdered. Investigators are searching for the killer using their biggest clue: a recording of his voice from one of the victims' phones ordering the girls Down the Hill. Almost three years later, it's a mystery that still haunts the small town of Delphi, Indiana while police say the killer may walk among them.

13. Root of Evil

When Elizabeth Short, also known as The Black Dahlia, was brutally killed in 1947, it gripped the entire country. More than 70 years later, it remains America's most infamous unsolved murder. Many believe Dr. George Hodel was the killer, thanks to an investigation by Hodel's own son. But murder is just part of the Hodel family story, one filled with horrifying secrets that ripple across generations. Now, through never-before-heard archival audio and first-time interviews, the Hodel family opens up to reveal their shocking story. In this eight-part documentary series, sisters Rasha Pecoraro and Yvette Gentile, the great grand daughters of George Hodel, take a deep dive into their family history to try to figure out what really happened, and where do they all go from here? Root of Evil is the companion podcast to TNTs limited series I Am the Night. Inspired by the true story of the Hodel family, the series stars Chris Pine and comes from acclaimed Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins.

14. The Clearing

When April Balascio was 40 years old, something she’d feared for decades was finally proven true. Her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, really was a murderer. The Clearing is about what came after April called a detective in 2009 to tell him about her suspicions — a call that led to her father’s arrest and eventual conviction on multiple murders — and tracks the emotional journey as she and host Josh Dean dig back into her childhood, unravel the truth of her father’s life, and overturn a viral online narrative that had turned Edward Wayne Edwards into a kind of serial killer caricature.

15. Culpable

Culpable explores unsettled cases where the people who seem deserving of blame have somehow eluded justice. On February 26, 2014, Christian Andreacchio was found dead in the upstairs bathroom of his apartment from a single gunshot wound to the head. After a mere 45-minute investigation, local police ruled his death a suicide, despite substantial evidence that points to Christian’s death not only being a homicide, but premeditated murder. Host Dennis Cooper investigates and shares a compelling story about this suspicious death, the questions surrounding it, and a grieving family’s ongoing fight for justice.

[wokeinmemphis-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[arcadeparade-blog1]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[redroses879-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[asanusta-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[pooki-chu-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[sophistikatedblogger-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[crashinthefastlane-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[theeblacksheep-blog1]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[quebrando-promesas-blog1]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[ourclassycollectionpainter-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[flickdirect]

Tuesday nights are a flurry in my house when 8 p.m. comes because my son absolutely refuses to miss The Flash. Developed by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Geoff Johns, The Flash is about a young man who gets super speed when a local lab explodes, creating "meta-humans". Luckily, our Flash is a superhero with good intentions and spends his time, with his band of friends, wife, and father-in-law, tracking down other meta-humans who seek to do no good. In a time when our children seem to grow quicker than the speed of light, The Flash is a show that the entire family can definitely watch and then engage in an actual conversation about the endless theories that surround this television series and all of their characters.

Season Four tested The Flash/Barry Allen (Grant Gustin; Glee) in a way he hasn't been tested before. After entering the speed force, at the end of Season Three, to protect his friends, Season Four returns with Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale; Insurgent) and Cisco Ramirez (Carlos Valdes) struggling to protect Central City. After losing a battle, where the foe wants The Flash, Cisco and Wally realize they need to find a way to bring Barry back to Central City. While Barry's friends do find a way to bring him out of the speed force, his return releases dark matter, which turns twelve people into meta-humans. The team spends season four trying to save the meta-humans and defeat this season's foe, The Thinker.

The Thinker (Neil Sandilands) is, by day, a genius professor named Clifford DeVoe, who is trying, in his own mind, to "fix the world" by collecting powers. Throughout the season, the audience finds out that DeVoe orchestrated the exact return location point of Flash from the speed force so that his return would affect the bus riders and give them the powers he, himself, sought. DeVoe is a worthy opponent, not only being one of the meta-powers but a foe with a brilliant mind. He strategizes and sees every possibility so that The Flash and his friends are defeated almost every time. It becomes increasingly frustrating for Barry and for H.R. (Tom Cavanagh, Yogi Bear), as neither one of these characters is used to being intellectually defeated. H.R. puts who he is at risk to help the team and Barry must come to terms with what being a leader, teacher, and friend is when he takes Ralph Dibney/Elongated Man (Hartley Sawyer; The Young & The Restless), one of the twelve meta-humans under his wing.

Season four is more of a mystery than other seasons. The plot, while concise and clear, was not always apparent to the audience. This was actually a great way to write the season, as every episode seemed to be a continuing climactic ride. Whereas prior seasons have had several villains to deal with, season four was really about DeVoe. The writers outdid themselves with season four, creating episode after episode, building up a series long cohesive storyline, that left you sitting on the edge of the seat until the very last minute of the season finale's epic conclusion.

Warner Bros. and DC Comics also have several other superhero shows on television. In order to bring their universe together, the actors work on a four (4) part cross-over series every year, creating a storyline that befits all of the Superheroes. This year, the writers played upon the different Earth's (Supergirl said there are 52 but H.R. said there were 53) and doppelgangers to bring us familiar faces but not familiar ethics. Our heroes from Earth-X were in fact, the bad guys and their world was based upon the Nazi regime. While the writers did a great job of showing the dark sides of our favorite heroes, including The Flash, it was a little disconcerting relating them to the Nazi regime. Barry Allen is supposed to be the nice Jewish guy from next door so seeing him as a Nazi was just -weird. Regardless, this storyline brought back a beloved character we have all missed- Leonard Snart/Captain Cold. Wentworth Miller (Prison Break) is such a unique actor that watching him onscreen is simply a pleasure.

Warner Bros. gives us season four of The Flash in 1080p High Definition widescreen16x9 with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The contrast between the dark colors of DeVoe and the white colors of what his wife, Marlize (Kim Engelbrecht; Eye in the Sky), wore seemed as a foreshadowing of what was to come. The pitchy colors of Ralph's office were apropos, setting the scene of his background in the police force and his job as a private investigator. As in my season three review, I still find the special effects of the speed force with the blues and almost whispers of silver peeking out fascinating, as well as the reds and golds when The Flash is running. One additional special effect that was added was Ralph's stretching as his superpower. The special effects of contorting his body created a lighter aspect in a year when the entire plot seemed rather dark and devious.

The audio is presented in DTS-HD 5.1 Dolby Digital. Volume is consistent, sound effects are appropriate and not overwhelming, providing a well-balanced audiological experience. The DTS-HD 5.1 Dolby Digital is a full, rich sound that complements and supports the storyline without overpowering the dialogue.

The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray comes with bonus features to support every fan's obsession. Bonus features are provided on each disc.

Disc 1 – Episodes 1-7

- Deleted Scenes Episode 3, 4, and 5

- Special Feature: Gag Reel

Disc 2- Episodes 8-13

- Deleted Scene Episode 12

- Episodes 8-11 are the Crossover Events: Crisis on Earth-X.

- Special Feature: Inside the Crossover Crisis on Earth-X

Disc 3- Episodes 14-20

-Deleted Scenes Episodes 17, 20

-Special Features: The Elongated Man and Flash Time on Amunet Black with Katee, Eric, and Sterling (visual commentary)

Disc 4- Episodes 21-26

-Deleted Scenes Episodes 21, 26

- Special Feature: The Best of DC TV's Comic-Con Panels San Diego 2017

The Flash is one of the best television shows today. The writers bring consistent storylines. The acting is natural as if the characters are letting the audience into their lives. The comedic character of Ralph balanced out the darkness of DeVoe, this season. Barry Allen is continually growing both as a man and as a superhero. The bonus and special features provided on the disc are supportive of the season and a wonderful edition for those who love The Flash and just want to know more about his world. The Flash: The Complete Fourth Season is a definite addition for any home entertainment collection.

Grade: A

About Jennifer Broderick A graduate of The George Washington University and Nova Southeastern Law School Jennifer Fischer Broderick’s fascination with the movie world started when she first saw Snow White on the big screen as a young child. When the producers of the movie Annie held auditions in NYC, Jennifer stood on line in the cold to try out for a part and actually made it past the first few try-outs. A vivacious reader, she is fascinated watching books and stories brought to life on the big screen. Jennifer has passed her love of movies onto her children and they are often found planning their weekends around opening premieres.

Read more reviews and content by Jennifer Broderick.

via FlickDirect Entertainment News, Exlclusive Interviews, and Film Reviews

[kybelles]

mary was only around 21 when she had neil. she was barely an adult. i need to be sedated.