Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died at the age of 87, CNN reports. According to NPR, the Supreme Court announced her death, which was caused by complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas. Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court since 1993, having been appointed by then-president Bill Clinton. The Court’s statement said she died in her home in Washington surrounded by family.

“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today, we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice.”

Ginsburg was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, to Nathan and Celia Bader. When she was in high school, she was a baton twirler and treasurer of the Go Getters club. She grew up admiring her mother, who taught her the importance of being independent. “My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent,” Ruth said in a video filmed in 2012. Celia passed away before Ruth finished high school.

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Ruth went to Cornell University for undergrad to study government, and that's where she met her husband Martin Ginsburg. She graduated in 1954, first in her class, and the two got married that same year. Her next stop was Harvard Law School, where she was only one of nine women in a class of 500.

Ruth remembered a time when the dean of the law school invited all the women in the class to dinner and called on each of them to say why they were attending, occupying a seat “that could be occupied by a man.” (There were 491 men in the class.)

“You felt in class as if all eyes were on you, and if you didn’t perform well, you’d be failing not only for yourself but for all women.”

Ruth excelled and was the first woman named to the prestigious Harvard Law Review. She ended up transferring to Columbia Law School in New York, and she graduated first in her class.

Even so, after law school she was turned down by 14 separate firms. She clerked for a judge and then went on to be a professor at Rutgers and Columbia. She cofounded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU in 1972. While she served in that position, she argued six cases in front of the Supreme Court.

All six cases focused on gender issues, whether that be advocating for men or women who had been disadvantaged because of their sex. For example, in Duren v. Missouri, she argued for a man who claimed his jury wasn’t totally fair because women were automatically exempted. In Califano v. Goldfarb, she argued for Leon Goldfarb, a widower who was denied survivor’s benefits because he was a man. And Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld saw her argue for a man who was denied social security for him and his son after his wife passed away.

When Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993, she was only the second woman to be a Supreme Court justice, after Sandra Day O’Connor. “Throughout her life, she has repeatedly stood for the individual, the person less well-off, the outsider in society, and has given those people greater hope by telling them that they have a place in our legal system, by giving them a sense that the Constitution and the laws protect all the American people, not simply the powerful,” Bill Clinton said when he nominated her.

She caused controversy with her dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore, a case which basically decided the 200o election after the recount in Florida. Typically, when justices write a dissenting opinion, they end it with the word “respectfully,” but she felt so strongly about it that she ended her opinion with a simple “I dissent.”

Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Repinterest
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Throughout her career, she was a champion of equal rights. Ginsburg is widely seen as having a major impact on the Obergefell v. Hodges case in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. During the hearing, she refuted one of the arguments by explaining that the country couldn’t cling to its old ideals.

“Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female,” she told her fellow justices. “That ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down….Would that be a choice that state should [still] be allowed to have? To cling to marriage the way it once was?”

She wrote the dissent in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company case, in which Lilly Ledbetter lost her appeal to file a pay discrimination lawsuit after the 180-day statute of limitations. Eventually, Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, directly addressing the ruling in that case.

And when Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the most important abortion case to reach the court since Roe v. Wade came in front of the court in 2016, Ruth was vocal in her support of ruling against Texas’s strict abortion laws. “It is beyond rational belief that [the law] could genuinely protect the health of women,” she wrote.

In 2010, Ruth’s husband Martin died of cancer. At one point during their marriage, she said that Martin was “the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain.” She didn’t miss a single day of Court after his passing.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with husband Martin Ginsburg...pinterest
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In the last few years, Ruth’s fame has skyrocketed, and she’s become something of a meme-able icon to women around the world. She inspired the #NotoriousRBG hashtag and the nickname that followed. She went viral after executing her impressive workout routine with Stephen Colbert.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Ruth harshly criticized presidential nominee Donald Trump, telling the New York Times, “I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.” Supreme Court Justices make it a habit to avoid commenting on presidential nominees, and Trump called on her to resign after those comments. She eventually apologized.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer keeps Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg awake during the State of the Union Addresspinterest
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In 2018, a documentary about Ginsburg called RBG was released, and in it, Gloria Steinem called her “the closest thing to a superhero I know.”

Ruth is survived by her children, Jane and James, and her grandchildren, Paul and Clare.

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Emma Baty
Senior Entertainment Editor

Emma Baty is the Senior Entertainment Editor at Cosmopolitan, where she shapes TV, movie and music coverage, writes celebrity profiles, edits stories across both print and digital, and generally obsesses over all things pop culture. Prior to this role, she worked as Cosmopolitan.com’s News Writer, writing celebrity news stories daily and covering live events like the Oscars. Originally from Grand Haven, Michigan, she currently lives in Brooklyn.