Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States passed away on Friday due to complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas. She was 87 years old.
Justice Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She was the second woman appointed to the Court and served more than 27 years.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. said of Justice Ginsburg: “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Thousands gathered outside the US Supreme Court to mourn the death of Justice Ginsburg, who was known as a pioneering figure in the fight for women’s legal equality.
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In 1996, Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion when the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admission policy. The court’s 7-1 ruling said VMI violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back pay available for victims of employment discrimination. She accused the eight male justices of being indifferent to the gender pay gap.
“The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said, calling upon Congress to act where the court had not.
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that certain for-profit companies cannot be required by the government to pay for specific types of contraceptives, such as methods of birth control and emergency contraception, for their employees.
In her dissent, Ginsburg wrote the court had “ventured into a minefield,” adding it would disadvantage those employees “who do not share their employer’s religious beliefs.”
