Before Becoming “The Notorious RBG” Ginsburg Taught in Newark
By Walter Elliott
NEWARK – The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, long before she became Associate Justice of the United State Supreme Court, taught here at the Rutgers School of Law 1963-72.
It could be said that Ginsburg, whose death in Washington, D.C. was announced before 6 p.m. Sept. 18, started becoming “Notorious” by representing the ACLU’s New Jersey chapter during that 10 year period.
Ginsburg was a faculty member of the Rutgers School of Law, which was at 180 University Ave. for some of those years. She taught a range of courses by day, from introduction to tort law to conducting mock trials.
Ginsburg was a commuter, coming from and returning to the apartment she and husband Martin shared in Manhattan. M. Ginsburg was an attorney in a law firm there before becoming an NYU Law School faculty member in 1967.
Ginsburg, during her 27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court bench, recalled her Newark years while talking with the pioneering Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
“We had no idea that we would be on the Supreme Court then,” said Ginsburg. “We were out looking for a job.”
Joan Ruth Bader, who was born in Brooklyn March 15, 1933, went to Cornell on a scholarship and, later, the Harvard Law School. She transferred to Columbia’s school of law in her senior year to be with Martin, who she would marry after her May 1955 graduation – and after learning that Harvard was planning not to grant her a law degree.
Although Ruth Bader Ginsburg was co-valedictorian in her graduating class with high recommendations, the otherwise automatic doors to prestigious law firms and clerkships to Supreme Court Justices were shut. Even SCOTUS Justice Felix Frankfurter turned R.B. Ginsburg down.
The Ginsburgs were stationed in Fort Sill, Okla. for Martin’s military service until they eventually found respective jobs in Rutgers-Newark and New York.
“Law firms were just getting around to hiring Jews in the 1950s,” recalled Ginsburg in 1993. “To be a Jew, a woman and a mother (to Jane, in 1955) to boot – that combination was a bit much for them.”
Although Rutgers was one of the few universities welcoming women faculty, Ginsburg felt she had to hide her pregnancy. She wore loose-fitting clothing until after son James was born in 1965.
Ginsburg was also listening to her students’ stories of being the few women in law school. It was about that time when the ACLU-NJ, which moved to 45 Academy St. in 1968, called to represent them and their clients in their growing sex discrimination lawsuits.
“The thinking at that time,” said Ginsburg, “was that sex discrimination cases was a woman’s job.”
Some Rutgers law students, used to seeing Ginsburg carrying home a satchel of papers, were now seeing her lug a second for ACLU cases. Rutgers administrators also noticed and made her director of its Women’s Law Review.
Rutgers Law student Elizabeth Langer met Ginsburg through the Woman’s Rights Law Reporter in 1970. The professor found a basement room for The Reporter’s office and vouched for it, while its volunteer staff sought funding, in 1970.
“She gave us credibility, legitimacy (and) defended us against faculty members who thought (The Reporter) was ridiculous,” said then-editor-in-chief Langer. “She shepherded us through, along with a lot of enthusiastic law students – mostly women.”
The future Justice meanwhile wrote the ACLU’s brief in the 1971 Reed vs. Reed case, which went before SCOTUS. The case involved an Idaho state law that granted only men to execute estates.
Ginsburg and the ACLU argued that the Idaho law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal treatment clause. The Supreme Court, presided by Chief Justice Warren Berger, agreed with their argument Nov. 22, 1971 – overturning a century-old law.
Ginsburg did not bask in that victory glow while at Rutgers long. The Columbia School of Law offered her a full-tenured professorship, the first that they had made to a woman. She took up the offer and left Rutgers in 1972.
“Rutgers students sparked my interest and aided in charting the course I then pursued,” said Ginsburg in 2017. “Less than three years after starting the (Women’s Law Review) seminar, I was arguing sexual discrimination cases before the Supreme Court.”
