User:Knope7/sandbox/Ruth Bader Ginsburg

New article name goes here new article content ... abcd

Early life
Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Ruth Joan Bader is the second daughter of Nathan and Celia (née Amster) Bader, Russian-Jewish immigrants, who lived in the Flatbush neighborhood. The Baders' older daughter, Marylin, died at age 6 when Ruth was still young. The family nicknamed Ruth "Kiki". They belonged to the East Midwood Jewish Center. At age thirteen, Ruth acted as the "camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program at Camp Che-Na-Wah in Minerva, New York.

Her mother took an active role in her education, taking her to the library often. As a young girl Ruth's mother spurred on her education. Celia had been a good student in her youth, graduating from high school at age 15, yet could not further her own education because her family chose to send her brother to college instead. Celia wanted to see her daughter get more of an education, which she thought would allow Bader to become a high school history teacher. Bader attended James Madison High School, whose law program later dedicated a courtroom in her honor. Her mother struggled with cancer throughout Bader's high school years and died the day before her graduation.

Bader attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was a member of Alpha Epsilon Phi. While at Cornell she met Martin D. Ginsburg at age 17. She graduated from Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government on June 23, 1954. Bader married Martin Ginsburg a month after her graduation from Cornell, and followed her new husband to Fort Sill, Oklahoma where he was stationed as an ROTC Officer in the Army Reserve called up for active duty. At age 21, she worked for the Social Security office in Oklahoma where she was demoted after becoming pregnant with her first child. She gave birth to a daughter in 1955.

In fall 1956, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of about 500. The Dean of Harvard Law reportedly asked the female law students, including Ginsburg, “How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?” When her husband took a job in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School and became the first woman to be on two major law reviews, the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review. In 1959 she earned her Bachelor of Laws at Columbia and tied for first in her class.

Early career
At the start of her legal career, Ginsburg faced difficulty finding employment being a wife, a mother of a five-year old daughter, and jewish. In 1960, despite a strong recommendation from a dean of Harvard Law School, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter turned down Ginsburg for a clerkship position because of her gender. Later that year, Ginsburg began a clerkship for Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a position she held for two years.

Academia
From 1961 to 1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, learning Swedish to co-author a book with Anders Bruzelius on civil procedure in Sweden. Ginsburg conducted extensive research for her book at Lund University in Sweden. Ginsburg's time in Sweden also influenced her thinking on gender equality. Ginsburg was inspired observing the changes in Sweden where women were 20-25% of all law students and one of the judges Ginsburg watched for her research was eight-months pregnant and still working.

Her first position as a professor came at Rutgers Law School in 1963. The position was not without its drawbacks; Ginsburg was informed she would be paid less than her male colleagues because she had a husband with a good paying job. At the time Ginsburg entered academia, she was one of less than twenty women law professors in the United States. She was a professor of law, mainly Civil Procedure, at Rutgers from 1963 to 1972, receiving tenure from the school in 1969. In 1970 she co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women's rights.

From 1972 until 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the institution's first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination.

"Ginsburg swept away all such misgivings by establishing a solid reputation for the painstaking accuracy of her work, the intellectual depth of her legal concepts, and the strength and clarity of her vision of women's rights as human rights."

Litigation and advocacy
In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, in 1973, she became the ACLU's General Counsel. The Women's Right Project and related ACLU projects participated in over 300 gender discrimination cases by 1974. As the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. Rather than asking the Court to end all gender discrimination at once, Ginsburg charted a strategic course, taking aim at specific discriminatory statues and building on each successive victory. She also chose plaintiffs carefully, at times picking male plaintiffs to demonstrate that gender discrimination was harmful to women and men The laws Ginsburg targeted include those which on the surface appeared beneficial to women but in fact reinforced the notion that women needed to be dependent on men. Her strategic advocacy extended to word choice, favoring the use of "gender" instead of "sex," after her secretary suggested the word sex would serve as a distraction to judges. She attained a reputation as a skilled oral advocate and her work directly led to the end of gender discrimination in many areas of the law.

Ginsburg volunteered to write the brief for Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), wherein the Supreme Court extended the protections of the Equal Protection Clause to women for the first time. She argued and won Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), which challenged a statute making it more difficult for a female service member to claim an increased housing allowance for her husband than for a male service member seeking the same allowance for his wife. Ginsburg argued the statute treated women as inferior, and the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Ginsburg's favor. The Court again ruled in Ginsburg's favor in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636 (1975), where Ginsburg represented a widower denied survivor benefits under Social Security, arguing it discriminated against female workers the same protection as their male counterparts. Ginsburg filed a brief for the case Craig v. Boren,  429 U.S. 190 (1976), challenging an Oklahoma statute imposing different minimum drinking ages for men and women. The Court imposed what is known as "intermediate scrutiny" on laws discriminating based on gender, that is the government needed to show an compelling interest in imposing the gender based classification. Her last case as a lawyer before the Court was 1978's Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357 (1979), which challenged the validity of voluntary jury duty for women. In Ginsburg's view, women's participation in a government service as vital as jury duty should not be optional. At the end of Ginsburg's oral presentation, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist asked Ginsburg, "You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony on the new dollar, then?" Ginsburg said she considered responding "We won't settle for tokens," but instead opted not to answer the question. Although Ginsburg never received a seminal ruling banning all gender based discrimination, her legal scholars and advocates credit Ginsburg with significant legal advances for women under Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and discouraged legislatures from treating women and men differently under the law. Ginsburg continued to work on the ACLU's Women's Rights Project until her appointment to the Federal Bench in 1980.

Search and Seizure
Justice Ginsburg has written notable search and seizure opinions for the Court.

Although Ginsburg did not author the majority opinion, she was credited with influencing her colleagues on the case Safford Unified School District v. Redding. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html?_r=0 During oral argument, Ginsburg suggested her colleagues, at the time all men, did not understand the effect of a strip search on a 13 year old girl.

Potential Sources: VMI http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/vmi/court.htm, series of opinions https://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/winter2004/opinions

Gradualism in Crim Pro http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1578490 ; Strip search violates child's rights http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html?_r=1 ; Traffic stop http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-court-traffic-stops-20150421-story.html ; http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/04/opinion-analysis-traffic-stops-cant-last-too-long-or-go-too-far-and-no-extra-dog-sniffs/

Fourth Amendment--

In Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009), Ginsburg dissented to the Court's decision to not suppress evidence due to a police officer's failure to update a computer system. In contrast to Justice Robert's emphasis on suppression as a means to deter police misconduct, Ginsburg took a more robust view on the use of suppression as a remedy for a violation of a defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. Ginsburg viewed suppression as a way to prevent the government from profiting from mistakes, and therefore as a remedy to preserve judicial integrity and respect civil rights. She also rejected Robert's assertion that suppression would not deter mistakes, contending making police pay a high price for mistakes would encourage them to take greater care.

Commerce Clause
Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act as a permissible use of governmental powers under the Commerce Clause.

In Rodriguez v. United States, the majority held that police could not prolong a traffic stop beyond the time need to complete it's mission to employ a drug sniffing dog. http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/04/opinion-analysis-traffic-stops-cant-last-too-long-or-go-too-far-and-no-extra-dog-sniffs/

Death Penalty
Ginsburg joined Justice Breyer's dissent in Glossip v. Gross asserting the death penalty should be abolished.

Gender Discrimination
Ginsburg authored the Court's opinion in United States v. Virginia which struck down the Virginia Military Institute's (VMI) male only admissions policy as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=facpubs VMI was a prestigious state run military inspired institution which did not admit women. Ibid. For Ginsburg, a state actor such as VMI could not use gender to deny women the opportunity to attend VMI with its unique educational methods. Ibid. Ginsburg emphasized that the government must show an "exceedingly persuasive justification" to use a classification based on sex.

Ginsburg found herself in dissent on Ledbetter v. Goodyear. Ginsburg called upon Congress to take action. The Court interpreted the statute of limitations on a discrimination action as starting to run at the time of every pay perioed, that is, the Court required a woman to act within a limited time period after she received a paycheck that was less than her male colleagues, even if she did not know she was being paid less as a woman. Ginsburg found the result absurd, pointing out that women often do not know they are being paid less, and therefore it was unfair to expect them to act. the Following the 2008 election, which elected Barack Obama to the presidency and democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Ledbetter Act became law. Ginsburg was given credit for helping to inspire the law.http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/31/ginsburg-female-justices-no-shrinking-violets-/2606239/

International law
Ginsburg supports using foreign interpretations of law for the persuasive value and possible wisdom, not as something which the court is bound to follow. Ginsburg has expressed the view that looking to international law is well ingrained in tradition in American law, counting John Henry Wigmore and President John Adams as internationalists. Ginsburg's own reliance on international law dates back to her time as an attorney as during her first argument before the court, 1971's Reed v. Reed, she cited to two German cases. In her concurring opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, a decision upholding Michigan Law School's affirmative action admissions policy, Ginsburg noted there was accord between the notion that affirmative action admissions policies would have an end point and international treaties designed to combat racial and gender based discrimination.

Personal life
Physically weakened after treatment for colon cancer, Ginsburg began working with a personal trainer. Since 1999, Bryant Johnson, a former Army reservist attached to the Special Forces, has trained Ginsburg twice weekly in the justices-only gym at the Supreme Court. In spite of her small stature, Ginsburg saw her physical fitness improve since her first bout with cancer, being able to complete 20 full push-ups in a session before her 80th birthday.

Recognition
Ginsubrg was named one of the American Lawyer's "Lawyers of the Century" in 1999. According to the magazine, "Ginsburg in large part created the intellectual foundations of the present law of sex discrimination."

Ginsburg Precedent
Ginsburg's name was later invoked during the confirmation process of John Roberts. Ginsburg herself was not the first nominee to avoid answering certain specific questions before Congress, and as a young lawyer in 1981 John Roberts had advised against Supreme Court nominees giving specific responses. Nevertheless, some conservative commentators and Senators invoked the phrase "Ginsburg precedent" to defend Roberts demurrers.

Trump controversy source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0da3a641190742669cc0d01b90cd57fa/ap-interview-ginsburg-reflects-big-cases-scalias-death