Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose 27-year tenure as the second female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court culminated a legal career dedicated to advancing the rights of women, has died.
She was 87, and her death comes less than two months before the election gives President Donald Trump a chance to try to shift the already conservative court further to the right.
She died due to complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer and was surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, the court said in a statement Friday. Ginsburg battled with five bouts of cancer.
Trump will now have a chance to fill a third Supreme Court seat. Senate confirmation of his nominee would increase the chances of a decision overturning or severely curtailing the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling.
Only days before her death, National Public Radio reported that Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has previously said the Senate would move to confirm any nominee this year, even though McConnell blocked President Barack Obama from having a hearing on his nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016. That set the stage for Trump to nominate Neil Gorsuch instead.
“Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement. “Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her -- a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Long before President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ginsburg argued cases before the court as a scholar and advocate of the women’s rights movement. She was a high-profile proponent of the unsuccessful effort to adopt an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S Constitution.
On the court, she built a record as one of the court’s most liberal members, supporting gay and abortion rights, President Barack Obama’s health-care law and restrictions on the death penalty.
Her strong dissents from rulings that cut back on voting rights and affirmative action won her the admiring nickname “Notorious R.B.G.” Two films about her were released in 2018: The documentary “RBG” and a Hollywood biography, “On the Basis of Sex.”
She drew criticism during the 2016 presidential campaign when she denounced Trump, who had clinched the Republican nomination, as a “faker” in a media interview. Ginsburg later said she regretted the comments. Trump called on her to resign, saying on Twitter that “her mind is shot.”
Ginsburg said she experienced gender discrimination personally when she tried, without success, to join New York City’s major law firms after being a star law student at Harvard and Columbia universities in the late 1950s.
Her experience was similar to that of the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, a Ronald Reagan appointee who joined the court in 1981 and retired in 2006.
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