The San Diego County Bar Association is deeply saddened by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her passing is an immense loss for our nation and our judicial system.

Justice Ginsburg was a role model and champion for people everywhere, and particularly for women and girls, who saw in her trailblazing life and career the ability to break barriers, to stand up against injustice, and to give voice to the voiceless.

As we have seen from the outpouring of emotion across our country, her loss is devastating to all who learned from her, who benefitted from her work as lawyer and jurist, and those who have celebrated her as she became a cultural icon.

Justice Ginsburg passed away on September 18, 2020 at age 87. Just a day earlier—on Constitution Day—she was awarded the 2020 Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center for her “efforts to advance liberty and equality for all.”

In honoring her life and her legacy, we remember important aspects of Justice Ginsburg’s life and career, and the impact she had on so many.

Despite having graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School (tied with another student), she was refused jobs merely on account of being a woman. She ultimately secured a federal clerkship in the Southern District of New York at the urging of one of her law professors, who promised the judge to find a replacement clerk if Ginsburg did not perform satisfactorily. She held that clerkship for two years, from 1959-61.

In 1963, at a time when few women were teaching in the legal academy, she became a law professor at Rutgers University and then Columbia Law School, where she taught their first-ever course on sex discrimination and began to architect the legal fight for women’s rights and gender equality. It was there that she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union in 1972, developing a step-by-step strategy built on challenges to laws that discriminated on the basis of gender as violating equal protection principles.

She eventually became Columbia’s first female tenured law professor and through the ACLU, oversaw more than 300 gender discrimination cases by 1974. She argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976.

Among her significant victories, which built on one another, she successfully challenged an Idaho statute that gave males express preference over females in executing estates (Reed v. Reed). In Reed, the Supreme Court for the first time extended application of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women. Building on that victory, she successfully argued that Social Security benefits should be applied to a widower equally as to a widow (Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld).

Then, in a case widely read by law students across the country, Justice Ginsburg served as amicus counsel in challenging an Oklahoma law that treated men disfavorably with respect to the drinking age—imposing on men a higher age limit to drink alcoholic beverages (age 21) than imposed on women (age 18). In that case, she helped achieve a landmark ruling that statutory or administrative classifications based on sex were subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause—the first time such heightened scrutiny was applied to classifications based on sex (Craig v. Boren). And in her final case as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, she advocated that jury service should not merely be “voluntary” for women, but should be mandatory as it was for men, given the vital role of participation in juries to our legal system (Duren v. Missouri).

Justice Ginsburg began her judicial career serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1980-93, having been nominated by President Jimmy Carter. She was later nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President William J. Clinton in 1993, and confirmed by a vote of 96-3. She is only the second woman to serve on our nation’s highest court, and the first whose death we mourn.

She also was only the sixth justice of the Jewish faith to serve on the Supreme Court. On the opening day of her final Supreme Court session, Justice Ginsburg—known for the collars she wore with her judicial robes—donned a collar with the word “tzedek” woven in silk. This honored the Torah verse, “tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” meaning justice, justice, shall you pursue.

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, retired from the Supreme Court in 2006, Justice Ginsburg remained the only woman on the Court until 2009. Later, when asked how many women would be enough on the Court, she famously remarked “when there are nine.” When people expressed surprise at that comment, she replied “There’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

As a member of the Supreme Court, she will be remembered as much for her opinions as for her powerful concurrences and dissents. In her majority opinion in United States v. Virginia, which struck down a males-only admissions policy as violating the constitution, she wrote: “Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature—equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.” And, her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. opined that the majority’s application of a 180-day claims filing period was inconsistent with Title VII’s broad remedial goals, but she noted that “the ball is in Congress’ court.” Two years later, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, expanding Title VII’s statutes of limitations in wage discrimination cases.

Dissenting in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case that struck down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, she pointed out that the legislation had passed with “overwhelming bipartisan support” and was “no ordinary legislation.” She observed, the Voting Rights Act “is extraordinary because Congress embarked on a mission long delayed and of extraordinary importance: to realize the purpose and promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. For a half century, a concerted effort has been made to end racial discrimination in voting. Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, progress once the subject of a dream has been achieved and continues to be made.” She continued, noting that in striking down the legislation’s remedial tools, “[t]he sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the [Voting Rights Act] has proven effective. . . In truth, the evolution of voting discrimination into more subtle second-generation barriers is powerful evidence that a remedy as effective as preclearance remains vital to protect minority voting rights and prevent backsliding.”

Justice Ginsburg’s most significant legacy may well be this: that while law is indeed a powerful tool with which to bring about justice, we can never take that for granted. We must be vigilant in protecting our democracy, preserving the rule of law, and serving as guardians of the public trust in our courts as independent arbiters.

As her loss is felt across our country and the world, her legacy lives on in opinions, articles, speeches, briefs, courtrooms, law offices, pop culture references, classrooms, and, of course, in our hearts and minds.

We carry with us her call to action: “Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” – Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg