THE late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the longest serving woman on the Supreme Court and a strong liberal voice on issues dividing the nation, will make history Friday as the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, an honor granted since 1852 to America’s “most distinguished citizens.” The historic event, which was announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday, will feature a formal ceremony for invited guests only because of the coronavirus pandemic. Lying in state is a tribute reserved for the most distinguished U.S. government officials and military officers, while lying in honor is a distinction given to private citizens. Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime friend of Ginsburg’s, called her a “jurist of historic stature” and said the words that best describe her are “tough, brave, a fighter, a winner” but also “thoughtful, careful, compassionate, honest.” Roberts spoke Wednesday during a private ceremony in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. Thousands of people paid their respects throughout the day to the women’s rights champion, leader of the court’s liberal bloc and feminist icon, who died Sept. 18 at the age of 87 due to complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. On Friday, Ginsburg will lie in state at the Capitol, the first woman to do so and only the second Supreme Court justice after William Howard Taft. Taft had also been president. Rosa Parks, a private citizen not a government official, is the only woman who has lain in honor at the Capitol. Ginsburg will be buried beside her husband, Martin, in a private ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery next week. Martin died in 2010. She is survived by her son and daughter, four grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Ginsburg’s death has added another layer of tumult to an already chaotic election year. U.S. President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are plowing ahead with plans to have a new justice on the bench, perhaps before the Nov. 3 election. Only Chief Justice Roger Taney, who died in October 1864, died closer to a presidential election. President Abraham Lincoln waited until December to nominate his replacement. Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She was only the second woman in U.S. history elevated to the high court, after Sandra Day O’Connor, who was named by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1930s and 40s. She graduated from Cornell University and then in 1956, enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of just nine women in a class of about 500. She juggled her studies with taking care of her first child. At Cornell, she met Martin, who was also a student at Cornell. Martin, who eventually became a nationally prominent tax attorney, exerted an important influence on Ruth through his strong and sustained interest in her intellectual pursuits. She was also influenced by two other people — both professors — whom she met at Cornell: the author Vladimir Nabokov, who shaped her thinking about writing, and the constitutional lawyer Robert Cushman, who inspired her to pursue a legal career. Martin and Ruth were married in June 1954, nine days after she graduated from Cornell. When Martin got a job at a New York law firm, they moved back to the city and she completed her degree at Columbia Law School. But despite graduating at the top of her class, the job market wasn’t welcoming. “There was not a single firm in the entire city of New York that would offer me a job,” she recalled. She said she had three strikes against her: she was Jewish, a woman, and perhaps the ultimate deal-breaker, a mother. “Legal employers were afraid ... that I would be staying home more than I was showing up for work,” she said. Of course, she proved them wrong, building an impressive career as a law professor, founding director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and federal judge. Her work with the Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s had a far-reaching impact. She argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning five of them to eliminate legal barriers that held women back in the workplace and civic life. She strategically advanced cases that would establish precedents for treating men and women equally under the law in such areas as jury duty requirements, social security and military spousal benefits, and even the legal drinking age. “She is to the women’s movement what former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African-Americans,” then-President Clinton said when he nominated her to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by retiring Justice Byron White. “I am proud to nominate this path-breaking attorney, advocate, and judge,” he said, portraying her as a nonpartisan choice. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.” Ginsburg won Senate confirmation by a vote of 96 to 3. “Her 27 years on the Court exceeded even my highest expectations when I appointed her,” Clinton said in a statement following her death. “Her landmark opinions advancing gender equality, marriage equality, the rights of people with disabilities, the rights of immigrants, and so many more moved us closer to ‘a more perfect union.’” She has described her approach to the law as cautious and measured, but over a quarter-century on the high court she assembled a track record of decisions placing her firmly in the court’s liberal wing. She supported abortion rights, marriage equality, the Affordable Care Act, and women seeking restitution for unequal pay. Conservatives criticized her for straying too far from the Founding Fathers’ original meaning of the Constitution. But when CBS News’ Mike Wallace pointed out to her in a 2006 interview that the Constitution never mentioned abortion or same-sex marriage, she responded: “Think back to 1787. Who were ‘we the people’? … They certainly weren’t women … they surely weren’t people held in human bondage. The genius of our Constitution is that over now more than 200 sometimes turbulent years that ‘we’ has expanded and expanded.” Ginsburg was treated for cancer multiple times — undergoing colon cancer surgery in 1999, an operation for early-stage pancreatic cancer in 2009, having tumors removed from her lung in 2018, radiation for a pancreatic tumor in 2019, and chemotherapy in the spring and summer of 2020. Yet she repeatedly insisted she had no intention of retiring as long as she could do the job “full steam,” and she rarely missed a day of work. To keep up her stamina she worked out with a personal trainer and became renowned for her notoriously tough fitness routine. When Martin, her husband of 56 years, died in 2010, she was back on the bench the next day. She credited their long and happy marriage to a piece of advice she once received from her mother-in-law. “She said, ‘Dear, in every good marriage it helps sometimes to be a little deaf,’” Ginsburg said. “And I followed that advice in dealing not only with my dear spouse but in dealing even with my colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Ginsburg achieved an unexpected measure of pop culture stardom in her later years, when a blog and online memes celebrating the soft-spoken, elderly justice as the “Notorious R.B.G.” went viral, leading to a best-selling biography by the same name. One of the book’s authors, Irin Carmon, told Rolling Stone in 2017: “When people ask us, ‘Why are young women inspired by RBG?’ to us it’s such an obvious question that it’s hard to answer. We live in a society that most of the time really stigmatizes ideals of gender equality and feminism, and there’s this woman who has for decades been using her power in the highest court of the land for good. That’s a really big deal.” A documentary film, “RBG,” and a Hollywood dramatization of her story, “On the Basis of Sex,” helped cement Ginsburg’s image as a crusader in the popular imagination. Ginsburg herself expressed a more modest view of a Supreme Court justice’s role: “Judges are something like firefighters. They don’t make the fires, but they do their best to put them out.” (SD-Agencies) | 