#TBT: President Clinton Appoints Ruth Bader Ginsburg

     On August 10th, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court as an associate justice, a position she would hold for 27 years until her death in 2020. Appointed by Bill Clinton and confirmed in a hearing led by Joe Biden, she was the second woman to sit on the Court and the first Jewish woman, merely the culmination of a lifetime fight against prejudice.

     Despite losing her mother and older sibling as a child and her father's wishes for her not to pursue a career of her own, Ginsburg, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, graduated James Madison High School. After her husband, Martin, transferred to an ROTC base, she worked as an administrative assistant, where she was demoted and fired for getting pregnant.

     After earning her bachelor's degree at Cornell and leaving Harvard (a professor inquired why she was taking the place of a man at the school), she received her law degree from Columbia University in 1959 and became the first woman to write for two major law reviews.

     Ginsburg went on to teach at Columbia, Rutgers, and Stanford, writing numerous books and starting the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1973. Ginsburg went on to argue numerous cases before the Supreme Court over the course of a decade, mostly involving healthcare rights.

     On June 18th, 1980, she was appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter, a position she held until her Supreme Court confirmation. During her tenure, she wrote majority opinions that protected the rights of citizens to sue polluters, struck down male-only admissions policies in military institutions, prompted the federal government to do more for tribal sovereignty, and expanded the rights of people with mental disabilities.

     Even as she aged (her last decade of service was marked by people urging her to retire), she became renowned for her feisty opinions as a member of the left wing of the Supreme Court, and she has gone down in history as among the most important feminist icons in America. 30 years ago today, her place in history was sealed, but she was much more than a justice: she was justice personified.