On August 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Although she was not the first woman on the Court, she was its first sorority woman.
Justice Ginsburg died yesterday after a long life well lived. The news of her death was a gut punch. #NotoriousRBG seemed invincible and now she is gone.
Ruth Joan Bader enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she became a member of Alpha Epsilon Phi. She was chapter president and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She graduated from Cornell in 1954.
Two years later, she entered Harvard Law School. There were nine women in the class of about 500. She was the first female member of the Harvard Law Review.
When her husband took a job in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School. She earned her law degree from Columbia in 1959.
Justice Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School and then went on to become the first female to be a tenured professor at Columbia Law School. She played a major role in the women’s rights movement of the 1970s in her work with the American Civil Liberties Union and its Women’s Rights Project.
She served on the D.C. Court of Appeals from 1980 when President Carter appointed her until 1993 when she became a member of SCOTUS. Although she was small of stature, she was a commanding presence. She once said, “I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability.” And that she did. May her memory be a blessing.
My condolences to her family, friends and Alpha Epsilon Phi sisters.
