Pictured Above: Rebecca Nero is a senior political science major.
Courtesy of Rebecca Nero
By Rebecca Nero
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She laid the bricks and knocked down barriers for women; she was a woman of many firsts.
The first of nine women in a class of 500 at Harvard Law School, later she would graduate first in her class at Columbia Law School, where she would finish her law degree. While at Harvard, she cared for her husband, Marty, who was battling cancer while he was also in law school. She would take care of her daughter, Jane, and tend to not only her studies, but also Marty’s.
She was also the first woman to be on two major law reviews: the Columbia and Harvard Law Review. After all she’d accomplished, she still struggled to find a job after law school. She had three strikes against her – a Jewish woman with children.
But that didn’t stop her.
She became a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she would begin teaching a Woman and the Law course – something unheard of at the time. She would also be the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School. She later worked for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and started the Women’s Rights Project, where she knocked down sex-based discrimination case by case.
Through her work at the ACLU she argued six cases before the Supreme Court, a court of all men, and won five of them. Because of Ginsburg and her work before she arrived at the Supreme Court, women are able to sign a mortgage without a man, to work while being pregnant and/or having kids, to have a bank account without a male co-signer and to have a job without being discriminated against based on gender.
The second woman and first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court, she was a fierce defender of reproductive rights, workers’ rights and LGBTQ rights.
She was perhaps most known for her dissents and the dissent collar she wore. She would often say, “That is the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.”
Her dissents will be the blueprint for future cases and will speak to a future age. Perhaps they will eventually become the majority opinion and the dominant view.
Of course, true to her nature of ‘firsts’ she broke one last barrier in her death — the first woman to lie in state and the first Jewish person to do so.
As a daughter of a working-class teacher and a construction worker, I never saw myself pursuing a legal career of any kind, but I will now be the first lawyer in my family.
Not just a lawyer, but a lawyer who will fight for reproductive rights and reproductive justice. I never knew one could use the law as a means of securing civil rights and liberties until I saw not what Justice Ginsburg showed me but what the litigator and professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed me.
Something I look back on as I remember her is the first day of my Law and Politics class – my professor was telling us about her background and what she had done prior to working at USF St. Petersburg. My ears perked up at the sound of her telling us she had worked on Justice Ginsburg’s senate confirmation hearing in 1993. I was able to catch her after class and ask her about how she was able to work on the hearing and she told me all about it.
Little did I know, in that moment of us sharing some after-class camaraderie, that I would not only find a professor, but someone I look up to dearly and have a mentor and a confidante in. Since then, my professor and I have been working on researching Justice Ginsburg’s gender discrimination jurisprudence and have spent many hours combing through her law reviews and briefs together. Both of us share a love and respect for her. I have Justice Ginsburg to thank for bringing such a force into my life.
Thousands of people came out to Washington D.C. from all over to pay their respects to Justice Ginsburg, myself included, it was a sight to behold. There were little girls wearing dissent collars, people leaving letters and flowers and others waiting in line for hours to see her as she lay in repose at the top of the Supreme Court steps. It was moving and appropriate for someone such as her.
I think to myself: “What is next?”
It felt like she was the only person keeping our basic civil liberties and rights intact, which might say more about our corrupt system if anything. All these things were riding on the shoulders of an 87-year-old woman.
President Trump announced his pick for the now vacant Supreme Court seat – Amy Coney Barrett. She is the antithesis of the legacy left behind by Justice Ginsburg and we should not accept it.
If you care about reproductive rights, the Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ rights and women’s rights, then you should be concerned. All of these things are on the line. All of these issues are what RBG stood for and we cannot let them fall.
We must fight.
We don’t just vote – we organize, we mobilize, and we make our voices heard. We will not let her legacy and the work she fought so hard for be tainted.
She fought for us, now we must fight for her.
Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof. Justice, Justice shall you pursue.
Your writing makes my heart sing! ✌