A tireless champion of justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diminutive yet towering women's rights champion who became the United States Supreme Court's second female justice over 25 years ago, died Friday at her home in Washington, DC. She was 87.
Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said - and her death just weeks before Election Day is expected to set off a heated battle over whether US President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement.
Ginsburg spent her final years on the bench as the unquestioned leader of the court's liberal wing and became something of a rockstar to her admirers.
Young women especially seemed to embrace the court's Jewish grandmother, affectionately calling her the Notorious RBG, for her defence of the rights of women and minorities, and the strength and resilience she displayed in the face of personal loss and health crises.
Those health issues included five bouts with cancer beginning in 1999, falls that resulted in broken ribs, insertion of a stent to clear a blocked artery and assorted other hospitalisations after she turned 75.
Her appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was the first by a Democrat in 26 years. She initially found a comfortable ideological home somewhere left of centre on a conservative court dominated by Republican appointees. Her liberal voice grew stronger the longer she served.
She argued six key cases before the court in the 1970s when she was an architect of the women's rights movement. She won five.
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books," Clinton said at the time of her appointment. "She has already done that."
On the court, where she was known as a straightforward writer, her most significant majority opinions were the 1996 ruling that ordered the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its state funding, and the 2015 decision that upheld independent commissions some states use to draw congressional districts.
Besides civil rights, she took an interest in capital punishment, voting repeatedly to limit its use.
Ginsburg authored powerful dissents of her own in cases involving abortion, voting rights and pay discrimination against women.
She said some were aimed at swaying the opinions of her fellow judges while others were "an appeal to the intelligence of another day" in the hopes that they would provide guidance to future courts.
Justice Ginsburg was born as Joan Ruth Bader, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, the second daughter in a middle-class family. Her dream, she has said, was to be an opera singer.
Ginsburg graduated at the top of her Columbia University law school class in 1959 but could not find a law firm willing to hire her. She had "three strikes against her" - for being Jewish, female and a mother, as she put it in 2007.
She had married her husband, Martin, in 1954, the year she graduated from Cornell University. She attended Harvard University's law school but transferred to Columbia when her husband took a law job there. Martin Ginsburg went on to become a prominent tax lawyer and law professor. He died in 2010. She is survived by two children, Jane and James, and several grandchildren.