Supreme Court's Ginsburg to discuss access to justice

By Ann Nicholson

March 30, 2001

 

Ginsburg: Speaking here Wednesday

The lecture by Ginsburg, who is serving as a jurist-in-residence at the School of Law, is part of the school's Public Interest Law Speakers Series, "Access to Justice: The Social Responsibility of Lawyers."

When President Bill Clinton appointed Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, he called her "the Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law." University law professor Barbara Flagg, J.D., who served as Ginsburg's clerk while Ginsburg was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said, "Ginsburg's tenure on the Supreme Court has been noteworthy for her opinions that reflect her commitment to equal rights for all disadvantaged groups and her ability to forge consensus among the diverse members of the court."

Ginsburg was born the daughter of Jewish-Americans whose families were recent immigrants. After her mother died of cancer, Ginsburg attended Cornell University, where she graduated first among the women in her class. She and husband Martin, also a Cornell graduate, both attended Harvard Law School. As the mother of a young child, Ginsburg was one of nine women in the class of 1959.

When her husband was diagnosed with cancer and undergoing treatments, Ginsburg attended both his classes and her own to ensure he would graduate on time. After he accepted a job with a New York City law firm, Ginsburg, who was a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia Law School, where she tied for first in her graduating class.

As a woman attorney in a male-dominated field, Ginsburg had difficulty finding a job until her clerkship with a district court judge in New York. She then took part in a comparative law project sponsored by Columbia Law School, co-authoring a book on judicial procedure in Sweden. She later helped translate the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure into English.

In 1963, she became the second woman to join the law faculty of Rutgers University and later taught at Columbia. Ginsburg, who directed the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, has spent much of her career using the law as a tool for redressing personal and professional inequities among women. Between 1972 and 1978, before her appointment to the bench, she argued and won five sex-role stereotyping cases before the Supreme Court. The decisions paved the way for unprecedented opportunities for women.

For more information on the lecture, call 935-4958.

Editor's note: Photograph of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Richard Strauss, Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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