Although Ruth Bader Ginsburg possesses a petite frame, her
voice is a powerful force on the Supreme Court. Only the second
female justice nominated to the country's highest court, she
remains a trailblazer on the path of women's rights.
 Justice Ginsburg was nominated to the high court by former
President Bill Clinton June 1993 to replace retiring justice
Byron White. She took the oath of office on Aug. 10, 1993.
Ginsburg was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. She holds
a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and attended
Harvard Law School before earning a degree from Columbia
Law School.
She served as a law clerk with Judge Edmund L. Palmieri
of the United States District Court for the Southern District
of New York from 1959 to 1961 at a time when few women held
such a position.
From 1963 until 1972, she taught at Rutgers Law School.
She joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 1972, becoming
the school's first tenured female professor.
During the 1960s, Ginsburg began working with the New Jersey
affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in litigating
sex discrimination cases, including those involving school
teachers whose jobs were threatened when they became pregnant.
In 1971, she helped write the ACLU's brief in the key Reed
v. Reed gender discrimination case before the U.S. Supreme
Court. The high court struck down a state law that gave
preference to men over women in naming administrators of
estates.
In 1972, the ACLU picked Ginsburg to head the historic
Women's Rights Project, where she argued a number of cases
before the Supreme Court. She was general counsel of the
ACLU from 1973 to 1980 and sat on its National Board of
Directors from 1974 to 1980. She was also a Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
Stanford, California from 1977 to 1978.
Ginsburg served on the United States Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit from 1980 until her Supreme
Court appointment.
Ginsburg and her husband Martin have two children.
-- By Raven Tyler, Online NewsHour
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