The Notorious Legal Impact of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

 



When legal dynamo Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away from pancreatic cancer in September of 2020, her death was met with international mourning. In her later years, serving as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ginsburg, or “RBG” as she is colloquially known, enjoyed status as a folk hero that reached far beyond her relevance to the legal community. The 2018 biographical documentary RBG serves to offer the viewer insight into not only Ginsburg’s personality, relationships, experiences navigating a patriarchal society, and even workout routine; but the legal cases that led to her lasting impact upon gender discrimination laws.

            To fully understand the influence that Ginsburg had upon United States law, one must turn to the laws that were in place at the time that she began her career in 1960. As the documentary describes, at the time it was legal for employers to fire a woman for being pregnant, for banks to require a husband’s co-signature for women to obtain credit, and even cases of marital rape generally avoided prosecution. With the advent of the first-wave feminist movement, Ginsburg noted, “women woke up and complained.”

            In the United States, the Constitution is upheld as the supreme law of the land. When any laws are found to be in conflict with the Constitution, the Constitution must prevail in matters of arbitration, with contradicting laws struck down in deference. Armed with the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states in part that “[no state shall] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” Ginsburg set out to rectify the legal discrimination that American women faced as a matter of course.

            One aspect of Ginsburg’s legacy that is impressed upon the viewer of the documentary is that it was not obtained overnight. As Ginsburg herself observes, discriminatory law is not rectified in one fell swoop, and “real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” Ginsburg’s first steps towards that enduring change were nevertheless important ones, made in the process of trying the case of Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), concerning the discriminatory prohibition of Air Force housing allowance for female members. While the landmark case succeeded with a plurality of the Court finding the policy unconstitutional, an attempt to adopt a policy of strict judicial scrutiny for subsequent cases concerning discrimination on the basis of sex failed to succeed.

            Following the success of the Frontiero v. Richardson case, Ginsburg undertook a new tactic of demonstrating that “gender-based discrimination hurts everyone” in arguing the case of Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), in which a widower was being denied parental benefits typically afforded to women with deceased husbands. The case served the ingenious purpose of illustrating the impact of such discrimination for a Court of exclusively privileged white men, who had theretofore been largely ignorant to the fact that it even existed. The unanimous verdict Ginsburg obtained in her favour was a pivotal moment in her efforts to obtain equality.

            Following the Frontiero and Wiesenfeld victories, Ginsburg continued to chip away at unconstitutional laws targeting women, winning five of the six cases she brought before the Supreme Court. By the time she was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice in 1993, her longstanding quest to reconcile discriminatory laws with women’s constitutional rights to equality had evidenced measurable results.

            Ginsburg’s steadfast commitment to justice as an extension of morality and inclusivity was apparent in her interpretation of the Constitution as a tool in creating “a more perfect union” for American citizens, and her votes and dissenting opinions throughout her term on the Supreme Court reflected this commitment. This was particularly apparent in later years, wherein a majority of Conservative justices voted to strike down provisions of the Voting Rights Act which served to protect against minority voting discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder (2013); or to allow employers to deny coverage of birth control for religious reasons in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc (2013).

            Ruth Bader Ginsburg espoused the idea that the United States Constitution existed to provide equal rights for all citizens rather than simply those who resembled the forefathers who were responsible for its drafting. Her long life and career was dedicated to a philosophy that she developed as a young woman, when observing the lawyers tasked with preventing the widespread human rights violations being committed against American citizens accused of being communist sympathizers throughout the McCarthy era of the 1950s. It is a philosophy that provided the backbone of her efforts in obtaining legal equality for women in a time when they were viewed as little more than ornamental and perfunctory, and one which politicians and lawmakers of today would serve well to adopt themselves: “I got the idea that you could do something that would make your society a little better”

 

Works Cited

RBG. Directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen. CNN Films, Storyville Films, Participant Media, and Magnolia Pictures, 201

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