Ginsburg, Ruth Bader

orig. Ruth Joan Bader

(born March 15, 1933, Brooklyn, N.Y., N.Y., U.S.) U.S. jurist. Although she graduated at the top of her class at Columbia Law School (1959), she was turned down for numerous jobs because of her gender. From 1972 to 1980 she taught at Columbia, where she became the first tenured female professor. As director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1980 she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and in 1993 she was appointed by Pres. Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court as only its second female justice. A member of the court's minority moderate-liberal bloc, she favoured caution, moderation, and restraint.

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader (1933– ) Supreme Court justice; born in New York City. She studied law at Harvard and earned her J.D. at Columbia Law School (1959). She taught at Rutgers University Law School (1963–72) and Columbia University Law School (1972–80). She was a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. (1980–93). She led the Women's Rights Project while at Columbia and she won several important cases before the Supreme Court during the 1970s. Nominated and confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court (1993), she was the second woman (after Sandra Day O'Connor) to sit on the nation's highest bench.