American judge Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the United States Supreme Court announced. The US Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement that “Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature.”
Even before her appointment, she had reshaped American law. When he nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, the US President Bill Clinton compared her legal work on behalf of women to the epochal work of Thurgood Marshall on behalf of African-Americans.
The comparison was entirely appropriate: as Marshall oversaw the legal strategy that culminated in Brown versus Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed segregated schools, Ginsburg coordinated a similar effort against sex discrimination.
Decades before she joined the court, Ginsburg’s work as an attorney in the 1970s fundamentally changed the Supreme Court’s approach to women’s rights, and the…