L

ate in the evening of the Jewish 

New Year Rosh Hashanah on Sept. 

18, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 

passed away from complications related to 

pancreatic cancer. 

Upon hearing the news of her passing, it 

is understandable why so many responded 

with punditry on the upcoming battle over 

her replacement on the Supreme Court of the 

United States and its intersection with the 

upcoming election on Nov. 3. Recognizing the 

possibility that Trump could appoint a nomi-

nee to tip the balance of the Supreme Court 

to a 6-3 conservative majority, Ginsburg said 

just days before her death, “My most fervent 

wish is that I will not be replaced until a new 

president is installed.”

Of course, some have criticized her for 

years about refusing to step down while Presi-

dent Barack Obama, along with the Demo-

cratic-controlled Senate, could appoint her 

successor before the 2014 midterm elections. 

Nodding toward the increasingly partisan na-

ture of Senate confirmation votes since her 

own 96-3 confirmation in 1993, she often re-

sponded with the argument: “anybody who 

thinks that if I step down, Obama could ap-

point someone like me, they’re misguided.” 

To carry out her final wish, there is so 

much of all us can do — donating to Senate 

candidates in swing states, making sure our 

friends have requested their absentee ballots 

or phone banking for the Biden-Harris cam-

paign to turn out the vote, to name a few. Here, 

though, I want to take a moment to appreciate 

the legacy of her life, work and jurisprudence.

Ginsburg was a trailblazer, especially so for 

women, but also for men — many of the cases 

she argued involved male clients who claimed 

damages as a result of laws written based on 

traditional gender roles. In Weinberger v. Wi-

esenfeld (1975), Ginsburg successfully argued 

on behalf of her male client who had been de-

nied Social Security benefits because he was 

a man and the law only provided benefits for 

widows who were the sole caregiver of their 

child. 

As a professor and founder of the Ameri-

can Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights 

Project, Ginsburg helped establish the first 

case law that extended the Fourteenth 

Amendment’s equal protection clause to pro-

tect women from discrimination on the basis 
of sex in Reed v. Reed (1971). Indicative of 

her place in a long line of women who fought 

for women’s legal rights, she credited Doro-

thy Kenyon and Pauli Murray as co-authors 

of the case’s brief in acknowledgment of the 

work they had done in laying the foundation 

for legal protections for women. 

Ginsburg’s unique approach of expanding 

legal rights for women by taking on laws that 

also hurt men didn’t end there. Disagreeing 

with many feminists at the time, she took 

issue with the legal basis of the rule estab-

lished in Roe v. Wade (1973). Instead of bas-

ing abortion rights on the right to privacy as 

included in the Tenth Amendment’s penum-

bras, Ginsburg believed the case should have 

been argued on the basis she helped establish 

in Reed. Specifically, she argued that laws 

criminalizing abortion violated the Four-

teenth Amendment’s equal protection clause 

because they discriminated on the basis of 

sex, meaning they should be subjected to a 

strict scrutiny review by the Court. Under 

this heightened and more stringent review, 

she believed, laws banning abortion would 

almost certainly be struck down. 

Throughout her career and her work as 

the second woman to serve on the Supreme 

Court, Ginsburg helped establish legal rights 

for women that seem basic now but were 

quite revolutionary in the late 20th century. 

Women today owe the following rights in 

part to her work: the right to sign a mortgage 

without a male co-signer, the right to open a 

bank account without a male co-signer, the 

right to pursue redress if employers discrimi-

nate on the basis of sex, be employed without 

being discriminated against based on gender 

and the right to be employed while pregnant 

and caring for children.

Her work paved the way for these funda-

mental rights, but it was the way she lived her 

life that paved the way for generations of fe-

male lawyers, judges and justices beyond her. 

Her jurisprudence became so influential that 

she was nicknamed the “Notorious RBG” by 

NYU Law student Shana Knizhnik for her 

powerful dissent in Shelby County v. Holder 

(2013) after pointing out the absurdity of 

Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion.

As the nickname was popularized and 

plastered on tote bags and mugs, the meme-

ification of Ginsburg took on a life of its own. 

Kate McKinnon even portrayed her on “Sat-

urday Night Live” but after seeing the video, 

Indie Wire reported that Ginsburg found “the 

comedian ‘marvelously funny, even if the im-

pression resembles her ‘not one bit.’” In fact, 

many, including her longtime friend and law 

professor Jeffrey Rosen, at first find her “aus-

tere” and mistake her silence for “inaccessibil-

ity.” 

Her warmth and care for others, however, 

is evident in the way she thought about the 

law. She saw her work as building toward 

a more “embracive” Constitution, one that 

eagerly welcomes previously marginalized 

groups — women, people of color, queer peo-

ple, etc. — in order to fulfill the promise made 

by the Framers of the Constitution in 1787. For 

a woman to set out to fundamentally change 

the role of the Constitution to protect vulner-

able people as she did in the 1970s was quite 

literally revolutionary. 

She believed so deeply in this mission that 

even her personal life became dedicated to 

working toward her vision of justice; her fa-

mously-egalitarian relationship with her hus-

band, Marty Ginsburg, was aptly summed up 

as one in which “(Marty) did the cooking and 

she did the writing and he picked up the kids 

from school and she did the writing. And, you 

know, he went to the meetings when the kids 

were bad and she did the writing.” 

In my own life, Ginsburg has served as a 

guiding light throughout my decision to pur-

sue law school. Applying to law school, which 

I have been doing for the last six months, is a 

notoriously difficult and exhausting process. 
Studying for the Law School Admission Test 

(LSAT) alone is a huge undertaking. I’ve of-

ten turned to rewatching “RBG,” the docu-

mentary of her life or “On the Basis of Sex,” a 

biopic of her early sex discrimination work. I 

referred to reading my favorite passages of “In 

My Own Words,” a book-length compilation 

of her speeches and writings, for inspiration 

to continue on.

For all of us, Ginsburg’s death is a painful 

reminder of how much work there is left to be 

done. Women have not yet experienced gen-

der equality in the U.S., and progress toward 

that end is likely to be dismantled by a 6-3 

conservative Supreme Court if Donald Trump 

and Mitch McConnell succeed in stealing an-

other seat on the bench without regard to the 

outcome of the election in November. With 

a case about the Affordable Care Act sched-

uled for arguments a week after the election 

and Republicans gunning to overturn Roe v. 

Wade outright, along with other cases that 

guarantee civil and voting rights, the need for 

feminist lawyers is perhaps more exigent than 

ever, and alongside all of the women before 

me, I plan to follow in her footsteps. 

Her life and legacy mean I have the oppor-

tunity to pursue an independent life and ca-

reer in the law, working to advocate for wom-

en and other marginalized people. Her work 

is the foundation every feminist lawyer should 

strive to build upon, and even in death, Gins-

burg continues to be a trailblazer: On Sept. 25, 

she became the first woman to lie in state at 

the U.S. Capitol in our nation’s history. 

May her memory be a revolution.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
15 — Wednesday, September 30, 2020 
statement

FOLLOWING IN HER FOOTSTEPS
MARISA WRIGHT, STATEMENT 
DEPUTY EDITOR

Two Tributes: On RBG and her legacy

T

here’s nothing more disorient-

ing than waking up from a dream 

that feels like real life. As my eyes 

opened from figurative to literal darkness, 

sweat dripping down my chest, I counted 

heartbeats to calm my rapid breathing.

In for six, out for four.

I grabbed my sheets in my left hand, my 

stuffed animal (one of ten) in my right in an 

unsuccessful attempt to ground myself in re-

ality. Nothing was working — the nightmare I 

just endured felt all too real. 

It was sometime in the distant future, the 

world filled with gray colors and dreary un-

dertones. I was dressed in a strangely famil-

iar red cloak — one that I had seen before, 

but couldn’t exactly remember where from. 

I raised my eyes from focusing on myself 

and turned to the society around me. I saw 

women dressed in this piercing red cloak 

everywhere in a uniform manner. Sud-

denly, it hit me. I had seen this off-putting 

environment before: it was the dystopian 

framework of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” As 

the world around me morphed into one by 

defined extreme fascism and a lack of au-

tonomy, I felt my stomach drop. The gut-

wrenching feeling triggered my conscious-

ness and pulled me back into the familiar 

setting of my room.

Under normal circumstances, I could’ve 

easily dismissed this dream as a distorted 

fluke of my wildest imagination and car-

ried on with my night. This wasn’t a normal 

night. It was hours after the passing of the 

revered Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader 

Ginsburg. My nightmare was a projection of 

my anxiety from Sen. Mitch McConnell’s in-

sensitive, opportunistic response to replace 

her seat just a few short hours after her 

death was announced. It not only scared but 

deeply disheartened me that we, the collec-

tive, let the fate of the U.S. fall on the shoul-

ders of an 87-year-old woman — a giant not 

only fighting her country’s political battles 

but her own medical obstacles as well. 

She deserved better than the reaction of 

horrified citizens plagued with crippling 

fear. She deserved to be celebrated and hon-

ored for everything she had done for us. 

And in order to mitigate my personal anxi-

ety, whether it be manifested in a dream or 

in everyday thoughts, I am attempting to 

channel my sorrow in a more productive 

way — one more fitting of the beautiful life 

she lived. Here’s to you, RBG. 
R

BG set the path for my life since I 

first learned of who she was. I was 

introduced to her in my eighth-

grade history class when learning about the 

Supreme Court. Though her story wasn’t told 

in its entirety, she was described as the sec-

ond female-appointed Supreme Court justice 

in the history of the U.S. — a trailblazer and 

champion for women’s rights. I was fascinat-

ed by her with just that description.

As I independently researched after school 

that day, I learned more about her upbringing 

and career. She was a Jewish woman from 

Brooklyn — a background that mirrored my 

own, as a Jewish girl from New Jersey — con-

stantly challenged by male peers who did not 

want her to succeed. Yet she succeeded any-

way, and she did it impeccably. She was one of 

only nine women in her year at Harvard Law 

School, and successfully maintained the posi-

tion as first in her class. Despite this incredibly 

impressive standing, she was denied from 12 

law firms following her graduation. She per-

severed and trusted her intellect, working as 

first a clerk for a law firm, then a professor and 

eventually, became the creator of the ACLU 

Women’s Project. 

During her time at the ACLU, RBG fought 

for gender equality in now considered land-

mark Supreme Court cases such as Frontiero 

v. Richardson, in which a precedent was es-
tablished to hold gender to higher scrutiny 

than the rational basis standard. She also 

argued for gender equality in Weinberger v. 

Wiesenfeld, in which she used an instance of 

gender discrimination against a man to help 

further establish precedents for future cases. 

RBG continued dismantling once normalized 

discriminatory gender practices throughout 

her career, arguing cases with an unparal-

leled eloquence, and landing her a seat on 

the Supreme Court with a 96-3 confirmation 

vote. 

She is the reason I can independently man-

age and spend my earnings without male con-

sent. She is the reason I can independently 

seek and own housing without male consent. 

She is the reason I cannot be denied employ-

ment based on gender. She is the reason I 

cannot be fired for being pregnant or having 

a child. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the direct and 

sole catalyst for so much progress this country 

has made.

The more I learned, the more I was in-

spired to follow in her footsteps. She be-

came the voice in my head; somewhat of 

a guardian angel guiding me in what aca-

demic steps to take and career decisions to 

make. 

I became focused on studying govern-

ment and political science, with hopes of 

going to law school — I geared my entire 

undergraduate college application toward 

that goal. I joined a pre-law organization 

because of her. I plastered pictures and 

RBG paraphernalia all over my room — like 

my Ginsburg socks, a calendar, a mug, three 

separate posters, a pillow and a desk plate 

that read “Do all the things with the confi-
dence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting.” 

I saw every movie or TV feature about her. 

I couldn’t believe it when I found out 

she passed away. It breaks my heart think-

ing about it. And while I mourn, I find 

strength in knowing that she never gave up. 

She worked tirelessly, without complain-

ing, until her final moments. RBG knew 

what she believed in; she had a strong 

moral compass, and it was her dying wish 

to protect that. So, now I ask myself, what 

more can I do to follow in her footsteps? 

How can I fight for positive change in the 

world? 

Thirty minutes after I woke up from my 

far-too-real nightmare, I lay staring at the ceil-

ing, tearful in RBG’s honor — for her life, for 

her legacy, for all she left behind for us to pick 

up. With this in mind, I remember how much 

there still needs to be done. I remember her 

spirit of perseverance, and how she continued 

to hold her head high against all odds. And 

while the odds appear intimidating, that’s all 

the more reason to continue pushing forward: 
Continue signing petitions, writing letters to 

government officials, calling local and nation-

al representatives, registering people to vote, 

studying law, protesting in the streets for what 

is right. If anything, we must do it for her. 

Taking a deep breath, I let one more tear 

roll down my face. I closed my eyes, slowly 

falling back to sleep, seeking solace in the fact 

that while I may cry now, I will rally tomor-

row.

CRY NOW, RALLY TOMORROW
ANDIE HOROWITZ, STATEMENT 
DEPUTY EDITOR

This dual column was written in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader 

Ginsburg's passing in September. 

