Ruth Bader Ginsburg Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Essay Example It is not possible to fully cover Ginsburg's contributions to women's rights in a paper of this limited scope. However, it will highlight her most importatnt work, and show how the progression of her legal reasoning has become the cornerstone of today's women's movement. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of women's rights foremost advocates, and she has earned a place in history as a woman that has led by example as well as action. Ginsburg immersed herself in women's issues at an early point in her professional life, and they became a hallmark of her career. Ginsburg was a groundbreaker, and at Harvard Law School she was one of only eight women out of a class of 500. She transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her class, though gender discrimination overshadowed her academic achievements.1 Ginsburg joined the faculty at Rutgers, and became "only the second female on the school's faculty and among the first 20 women law professors in the country".2 She became the first law professor at Harvard, directed the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, and by 1973 Ginsburg was arguing a Supreme Court case regarding equal benefits for men and women in the armed forces.3 Ginsburg gained the attention of President Jimmy Carter by winning 5 out of 6 Supreme Court cases, and consistently arguing that the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment applied to gender as well as race.4 Carter appointed Gins burg to the United States Court of appeals for the District of Columbia, and in 1993 she was "confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 96 to 3, becoming the 107th Supreme Court Justice, its second female jurist", and an outspoken advocate for women's rights on the bench.5 Since that date she has been instrumental in furthering the cause of gender equality in America. Foundational Legal Work Her early work with the ACLU on the Women's Rights Project prepared her legal skills for writing the Supreme Court decision on United States v. Virginia. The early 1970s ACLU test cases of Frontiero v. Richardson and Weinberger v. Weisenfeld were argued by Ginsburg and built a body of precedent "that swept away gender stereotyping once and for all".6 Ginsburg had a strategy of promoting equality, without regards to the gender of the injured victim. In Frontiero v. Richardson, Ginsburg argued that a man could be a legal dependent of a female Air Force officer, which made the woman eligible for dependent benefits. Weinberger v. Weisenfeld argued that a male was as equally entitled as a female to Social