By Debra Adams Simmons, HISTORY Executive Editor, National Geographic
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Say her name.
Few legacies in the history of American jurisprudence are deserving of more reverence
or of a nation’s tribute than that of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg,
who died Friday at age 87. The second woman ever appointed to a seat on
the nation’s high court, Ginsburg didn’t just break glass ceilings; she
was the Hope Diamond that shattered them.
A pioneering feminist,
towering intellect, and unlikely cultural rock star, Ginsburg will long
be remembered as a relentless champion of the 14th Amendment’s equal
protection clause. She made it her mission to navigate the court—and
America—into a clearer understanding of legal equal protection and how
the concept applied not only to racial and ethnic minorities but also to
women.
Seeking common ground was crucial to Ginsburg, even as a
13-year-old in a world emerging from the horrors of World War II and the
Holocaust. In an essay in her temple bulletin entitled “One People,”
she wrote that America must never fall into the division that destroyed
Germany. “For righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good
occupations nor fit companions,” she wrote.
Seventy-four
years later, upon her death, a divided nation faces twin challenges to
its future in replacing the justice and in electing a president in
November.
But how or should the nation replace a justice in the
weeks before an election? And, if a Supreme Court choice is rammed
through despite the will of most of the people, should the court be
enlarged to respect the people’s wishes?
In two stories, Nat Geo’s Amy McKeever examines precedent for election-year judicial appointments and the supposed “sanctity” of the size of the high court, which has stood at nine members for a century and a half.
In
both cases, there are challenges to conventional wisdom. Presidents
have appointed justices without Senate approval in the past. The size of
the court ping-ponged in its first decades, from six to as little as
five to as many as 10, before settling at nine. One president wanted to make it 15.
As
with so much about American democracy or democracies worldwide, we are
discovering there are fewer or weaker guardrails to the pure exercise of
power. To some, Ginsburg’s words as a teen, and her dissents in later
life, had a through-line to a more idealized nation; to others, she
represented an unwelcome path to inclusion, or an obstacle to attempts
to outlaw abortion.
Both conservatives and liberals, however, agreed on her focus and impact upon the nation.
From
three quarters of a century ago, Ginsburg urged Americans to use their
brains and not their emotions in choosing the way of what she called our
beloved land. “Prejudice,” the 13-year-old Ginsburg wrote, “saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.”
(Pictured above, Ginsburg sits at right in artist Nelson Shanks’ painting “The Four Justices.” It also portrays, from left, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Sandra Day O’Connor. It hangs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington.)
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