And in New York, twenty-four-year-old NYU law student Shana Knizhnik was aghast at the gutting of voting rights. The only bright spot for her was the unfettered rage of Justice Ginsburg—or, as her classmate Ankur Mandhania jokingly called the justice on Facebook, the Notorious R.B.G. Inspired, Shana took to Tumblr to create a tribute.
The transformation of public figures is an extraordinary phenomenon. Less than a decade before her death in mid-September 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still at best only the second most famous female member of that bench behind Sandra Day O’Connor—and she had been retired since 2006. Arguably even Sonia Sotomayor was more recognizable than Ginsburg as a result of her having been the most recent appointment. Certainly, the controversial Antonin Scalia, one-half of the most famous Supreme Court nomination hearings of all time, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts were more famous in 2010 than the tiny little soft-spoken “other woman” seated on the highest judicial bench in the country. And then, through the kind of magic afforded only by that mysterious zeitgeist known as “pop culture” everything changed. And all it took to elevate Ruth Bader Ginsburg from highly respected legal mind to the most famous and beloved member of the Supreme Court—probably ever—was the most unlikely of nicknames catching on like wildfire.
“Ruth, if you don’t want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you. If you really want to study the law, you will find a way. You will do it.”
Morris Ginsburg is Ruth’s father-in-law. Upon her marriage to Marty, Harvard informed Ruth that the circumstances of her application had altered. She would now be required to submit the financial records of her husband’s father as part of the process. The result was that Morris Ginsburg made the fateful decision to pay the tuition costs for the newest member of his family. Keep in mind this is the mid-1950’s: everybody was liking Ike and women were expected to stay home and raise the kids necessary jumpstart the population which had taken such a hit from the dual disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Morris Ginsburg clearly was not your typical 1950’s American male. In addition to assisting with the financial cost of educating his son’s brand new wife, he also handed out some advice to the young woman that she credits with being about as inspirational as it ever got, confessing that she approached everything else in life that came up after that moment in the same way, as a matter of duality: what do I want more?
“Ginsburg, J. filed a dissenting opinion.”
Actually, the quote above came to be a common search term on the internet for those looking for information about Supreme Court cases which had come before the nation’s highest bench since the appointment of Ginsburg. As he herself noted, “I do take, I suppose, more than a fair share of the dissenting opinions in the most-watched cases.” It is directly as a result of Ginsburg’s tenure on the court, in fact, the dissenting opinion in Supreme Court cases has really even come into the sphere of public knowledge about how the Court operates. While the announcement of the majority opinion in those cases where a split in voting has occurred is just the natural course of events, for most of the existence of the United States Supreme Court, dissenting opinions were written and then quietly filed away with the public none the wiser. Ginsburg changed all that though it will remain to be seen whether the alteration of custom and convention is here to stay.
