Ruth Bader Ginsburg obituary

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has died aged 87, was the second woman to sit on the supreme court of the United States. Nominated to the court by Bill Clinton in 1993, she had already established a reputation as a champion of gender equality and women’s rights as advocate, academic and appeals court judge. Throughout her long career, she was firm in her twin convictions: there is discrimination against women in the US (and elsewhere), and that discrimination violates the American constitution.

In her 27 years on the supreme court bench, she was a consistent moderate liberal. Her role as the senior liberal justice, after 2010, became increasingly important as the balance of opinion shifted in the court, and her scathing dissents on conservative majority decisions, particularly on women’s rights, made her a celebrated figure on the left.

In recent years Ginsburg was treated, as one New Yorker writer said, as “a pop culture feminist icon, a comic book superhero”. She was formidably clever, and had in her youth almost superhuman capacity for work. But what made her historically so important was her clear conviction of the injustice of unequal treatment of women, and her absolute certainty that it could be cleansed by applying the constitution.

Her emphasis changed over her long career. Early on, as a law professor at Rutgers, New Jersey and then Columbia, New York, and especially in her advocacy work for the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, she seemed a committed feminist. As director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the supreme court, winning five, persuading the bench that gender discrimination was a violation of the constitution’s equal protection clause. She sometimes argued – as she did in Weinberger v Wiesenfeld (1975), representing a widower denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth – that women, as well as men, could be the unfair winners of an unjust system.