#Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the unrelenting trailblazer for gender equality and the second-ever woman appointed to the high court, died Friday night. She was 87.

Ginsburg died surrounded by family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer, the Supreme Court said in a statement Friday night.

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., said of Ginsburg.

“We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague.”

The small-but-mighty Brooklyn-born jurist had clawed her way through the male-dominated legal industry early in her career and shattered gender norms as a pioneer for women’s rights in the 1970s.

She argued six landmark cases before the Supreme Court and was victorious in five of them that led to fairer treatment of women, as well as men.

In her 25 years on the Supreme Court, the outspoken octogenarian unexpectedly earned a cult following — and the nickname “Notorious R.B.G.” for her scathing dissenting opinions.

 

Born on March 15, 1933, Joan Ruth Bader grew up in Flatbush the second daughter of Nathan Bader, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States in his teens, and Celia Bader (née Amster), whose parents were Polish immigrants.

Some of the future judge’s earliest memories include trips with her mother to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library — a cramped location just off Kings Highway that sat above a Chinese food restaurant.

The bright young student, who graduated from James Madison High School in 1950, went on to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School.

She and Martin “Marty” Ginsburg were married in 1954. The couple had two children, Jane and James, together.

Marty, who was just a year older, was the first boy Ginsburg dated “who cared that I had a brain,” she recalled in the 2018 CNN documentary “RBG.”

At Harvard, Ginsburg was just one of just nine women in a class of more than 500 men.

“You felt you were constantly on display,” she said in the documentary. “So if you were called on in class, you felt that if you didn’t perform well, you were failing not just for yourself but all women.”

But she landed on the prestigious law reviews a top schools twice — first at Harvard and then again at Columbia Law School, where she transferred to in 1958 after Marty, who died in 2010, scored a job in Manhattan.

Despite her glowing academic achievements, no one would hire the young lawyer — because of her sex.

In 1960, she was rejected for a clerkship with then-Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who told the professor who recommended her that he wasn’t ready to hire a woman.

“I became a lawyer, in days when women were not wanted by most members of the legal profession, because Marty and his parents supported that choice unreservedly,” she said years later at her Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court.

As the first tenured woman professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, Ginsburg embarked on her lifelong career of fighting against gender inequality. She and other women employees at the school sued for fair pay after learning they were making substantially less than their male counterparts.

The women won the lawsuit — and that led to Ginsburg teaming up with the American Civil Liberties Union to handle sex discrimination cases and launching its Women’s Rights Project in 1972.

Between 1973 and 1976, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them, changing the landscape for women — and men — forever.

She was victorious in her very first case, Frontiero vs. Richardson in 1973, in which an Air Force lieutenant sued for her husband to obtain medical benefits that were at the time only granted to wives of servicemen.

Two years later, Ginsburg proved gender discrimination hurts men just as much as women. She represented Stephen Wiesenfeld in challenging the constitutionality of the Social Security Act. The young dad was denied benefits after his wife died during childbirth. The court ruled unanimously in his favor.

“She is one of the most influential people of the 21st Century,” Wiesenfeld told The Post in early 2019. “She changed a lot of the way people think about gender-based discrimination.”

In 1980, Ginsburg went from arguing cases — to deciding them.

As a judge on the Washington, D.C. Circuit of the Court of Appeals, she penned more than 700 opinions over 13 years.

Ginsburg ascent to the Supreme Court — the highest court in the land comprised of nine justices — was in 1993 when she was tapped by Clinton to replace retiring Justice Byron White.

On the first day of her Senate confirmation hearing, the 60-year-old jurist said she sought the lofty position to “serve society.”

“Serving on this court is the highest honor, the most awesome trust that can be placed in a judge,” she said. “It means working at my craft — work with and for the law — as a way to keep our society both ordered and free.”

Ginsburg was the second woman behind Sandra Day O’Connor to be appointed to the Supreme Court. In the following years, she was joined on the bench by fellow New Yorkers Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

In one of her most recognized opinions, Ginsburg led the charge in the court’s 7-1 decision that struck down Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions policy as unconstitutional in 1996.The ruling forced the nation’s oldest military school to begin enrolling women.

Ginsburg’s nickname “Notorious R.B.G.” — a riff off rap legend Notorious B.I.G. — spawned a book, memes and an entire clothing line prominently featuring the judge’s mug with a crown on her head.

“My clerks asked me, ‘Do you know where this comes from?’ And I said, ‘Yes I’ve heard of the Notorious B.I.G.,’” she said in 2017. “It seems altogether natural because we have one very important thing in common — we were both born and raised in Brooklyn.”

The soft-spoken jurist also made headlines for her glitzy jabots — but not just any.

She wore a gold collar with tiny pendants when she was set to vote with the majority — and a gothic-inspired necklace with jewels when she dissented.

As a judge, Ginsburg wasn’t afraid to go against the grain.

Ginsburg forged an unlikely friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative.

The odd couple — who adored each other despite their ideals that put them on either ends of the judicial spectrum — were even once photographed atop an elephant in India.

Long before her death, Ginsburg had battled other life-threatening complications, including colon and pancreatic cancer. She broke ribs in falls in 2012 and 2018, which is when doctors discovered the nodules on her lung.

But despite her advanced age, Ginsburg frequently worked out and could do as many as 20 pushups a session — as well as planks and squats.

“She’s tough as nails and she’s serious about her workouts,” the diminutive judge’s trainer, Bryant Johnson, told The Post in 2017.

Knowing her time was winding down, Ginsburg said she planned to retire at age 90.

Asked how she hoped to be remembered 100 years from now, Ginsburg — now one of the most recognizable heroines of modern day — evoked her work on the bench.

“That I was a judge,” she told students at Stanford University in 2016, “who worked as hard as she could to be the best of her ability to do the job right.”