Stay longer.
In the last week of his life, while they were attending a conference together in Lisbon, Portugal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked to then-retired Justice John Paul Stevens that it was her dream to serve on the United States Supreme Court as long as he had. He immediately responded, perhaps acutely aware of her critical role on the Court, “Stay longer!” Her death this week leaves me, too, with the wish that she could have stayed longer.
Our Constitution aches today for the loss of one of its greatest champions. Born March 15, 1933, the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant and an Austrian Jew, she grew up in a conservative Jewish synagogue. When her mother died of cancer, she was not allowed because of her gender to participate in the communal prayers for her mother, an exclusion that distanced her from the traditions of her faith.
Throughout her life, Justice Ginsburg cited the impact her mother had on her decision to pursue a profession. Her mother did not discourage her from marriage or family, but did discourage her from dependence, inspiring her always to have the means to take care of herself.
When she married her lifetime love Marty Ginsburg straight out college in 1954, societal expectations at the time were that her life should now take a different course. Ruth and Marty, though, became a legal power couple, taking on the challenges of family and career as a team, both set to go wherever their talents might take them.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Justice Ginsburg suffered many acts of discrimination on the basis of her gender, but she never recounted these incidents with the voice of a victim, instead she voiced them as the inspiration for her unyielding commitment to securing to women equal rights under law. She was the first woman to serve on the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review, and graduated number one in her class from Columbia. Nonetheless, she was denied employment by New York law firms and denied equal pay with her male colleagues when she did accept a job. These experiences led her to become a determined trailblazer for women, ever honing down the barriers created by gender stereotypes and normative beliefs about the role of women.
Over a span of 5 years, as leader of the Women’s Rights Project at ACLU and as its general counsel, she achieved victories in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and in courts across the country, that have forever changed the rights of women, in part by arguing that discrimination against women hurts men too. We take these victories for granted today, and do not see them as much deserving of the label “revolutionary,” but in the 1970s her arguments countered well-entrenched beliefs that it was logical for the law to favor men over women, to treat women differently after marriage, to pay men more than women, and to deny education and work to women.
Her arguments that the Constitution protects equality were not limited to gender. One of her most-impassioned dissents while a member of the Court was in defense of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its role in protecting Black Americans from hundreds of repeated attempts by state and local governments to keep them from the ballot box. Railing against the majority’s rejection of Congress’s determination that the protections of the Voting Rights Act continued to be critical to protecting the right to vote, she cited the example of “Bloody Sunday,” as well as numerous more contemporary examples over the ensuing decades that demonstrated that the Voting Rights Act remained “vital to protect minority voting rights and prevent backsliding.”
In the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case, Justice Ginsburg quoted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
We have lost someone whose steadfast commitment to justice was critical to continuing the bend of the arc. Notoriously, we have lost someone who made our country a fairer and more noble place. To her spirit of indomitable strength and tenacity in the battle to see all become equals before the law, I say: stay longer.
Teresa Wynn Roseborough is executive vice president – general counsel and corporate secretary for Home Depot.
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