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Beloved figure. ... And she practiced the highest American ideals as a justice: equality and justice under the law, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood for all of us.” 1/14 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, celebrating her 20th anniversary on the bench, is photographed in the East Conference Room at the U.S. Supreme Court on Aug. 30, 2013. (Nikki Kahn / Washington Post) 2/14 The U.S. flag was lowered to half-staff Friday evening in Washington after the Supreme Court announced that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at 87. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) 3/14 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrives for President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 24, 2009. (Pool photo) 4/14 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., left, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor listen to President Obama deliver his final State of the Union speech on Jan. 12, 2016. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) 5/14 President Obama is greeted by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as he arrives to deliver his State of the Union address in 2016. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) 6/14 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves a September 2019 speaking engagement at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press) 7/14 President Clinton walks with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the way to a June 14, 1993, news conference at the White House announcing her nomination to the Supreme Court. (David Ake / AFP/Getty Images) 8/14 Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg prior to the start of her confirmation hearing before the committee July 20, 1993. (John Duricka / Associated Press) 9/14 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with her hand on a Bible held by her husband, Martin, takes the court oath from Chief Justice William Rehnquist during an Aug. 10, 1993, ceremony in the East Room of the White House while President Clinton looks on. (Marcy Nighswander / Associated Press) 10/14 Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor arrive at the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol to hear Pope Francis address a joint meeting of Congress on Sept. 24, 2015. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) 11/14 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg answers audience questions during an event at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, R.I., on Jan. 30, 2018. (Pat Greenhouse / Boston Globe)

1933-2020Who Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg?Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School, going on to become a staunch courtroom advocate for the fair treatment of women and working with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. She was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980 and appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.Early Life and EducationGinsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. The second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader, she grew up in a low-income, working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Ginsburg's mother, who was a major influence in her life, taught her the value of independence and a good education.Celia herself did not attend college, but instead worked in a garment factory to help pay for her brother's college education, an act of selflessness that forever impressed Ginsburg. At James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Ginsburg worked diligently and excelled in her studies. Sadly, her mother struggled with cancer throughout Ginsburg's high school years and died the day before Ginsburg's graduation.Personal Life and HusbandGinsburg earned her bachelor's degree in government from Cornell University in 1954, finishing first in her class. She married law student Martin D. Ginsburg that same year. The early years of their marriage were challenging, as their first child, Jane, was born shortly after Martin was drafted into the military in 1954. He served for two years and, after his discharge, the couple returned to Harvard, where Ginsburg also enrolled.At Harvard, Ginsburg learned to balance life as a mother and her new role as a law student. She also encountered a very male-dominated, hostile environment, with only eight other females in her class of more than 500. The women were chided by the law school's dean for taking the places of qualified males. But Ginsburg pressed on and excelled academically, eventually becoming the first female member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.READ MORE: The Incredible Love Story of Ruth Bader and Marty GinsburgArguing for Gender EqualityThen, another challenge: Martin contracted testicular cancer in 1956, requiring intensive treatment and rehabilitation. Ginsburg attended to

For more on Justice Ginsburg, watch CNN Films’ “RBG” on Sunday, September 9 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Story highlights Ginsburg's 1996 ruling allowed women into VMI The school now has 1,700 cadets in its student body, which includes about 194 women Lexington, Virginia CNN — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a poignant visit to the Virginia Military Institute on Wednesday, her first trip to the state-funded school she profoundly changed some 20 years ago by striking down its all-male admissions policy. In a talk before the school’s cadets, Ginsburg said she knew her opinion, which opened the doors to women, “would make VMI a better place” and thought that those who were initially opposed would learn from their women classmates “how much good women could do for the institution.” Ginsburg explained that the gist of the opinion was simple. “There are women who are ready and willing and able to undergo the tough training at VMI and they want that opportunity,” she said. The school now has 1,700 cadets in its student body, which includes about 194 women, according to Col. Stewart MacInnis, the director of communications for VMI. Laura Tyler Chambers, a 2003 graduate, met with Ginsburg before the event and gave the 83-year-old justice her steel combat ring. “I gave it to her to thank her for battling for us,” Chambers said. Cadet Makayla Diamond, 20, from Virginia was in the audience to hear the speech. “I’m very thankful because without Ruth Bader Ginsburg I might not be here,” she said. “She allowed all these women to not only come here but to succeed in whatever they wanted to do.” In the 1996 opinion, United States v. Virginia, Ginsburg wrote “generalizations about ‘the way women are,’ estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.” During the talk, Ginsburg said she was wearing a “keydet” pin that the mothers of graduating cadets received in the ’60s. She said it had been sent to her from a man, who graduated in 1967, after his own mother died. “He wrote to me that this pin was given to the mother of every man in the graduating class and when his mother died he thought I might like to have the pin — he thought she would be proud if I would wear it,” she said. The impact of the ruling continues to be felt, both at the school and in the country at large. “The majority opinion in the VMI case is perhaps the best-known and most important majority opinion Justice Ginsburg has penned in her 24 years on the Supreme Court,” said Steve

Whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.”Such criticism of a political candidate was highly unusual for a sitting Supreme Court justice, and Ginsburg apologized.There was also friction between Ginsburg and some liberals in 2014, when pressure grew for her to retire while Democrats still held the Senate and the White House, which could guarantee that her seat would be filled by another liberal. Ginsburg brushed aside such concerns and let it be known she was not going anywhere, saying she still had a lot to contribute to the court.In 2014, Republicans claimed the Senate majority, and two years after that the White House was won by Trump, who had promised to appoint only conservative, anti-abortion justices.Ginsburg was the first Democratic nominee to the high court in a quarter of a century when she was chosen in 1993 by President Clinton.Ironically, she was not immediately embraced by liberals and women’s rights activists. Some feared she was too moderate, and others were concerned by Ginsburg’s past criticism of the landmark abortion ruling Roe vs. Wade.But Ginsburg’s objections were not about the outcome of the ruling. Rather, she believed the court’s opinion should have been based on more solid legal footing, namely a woman’s right to equal treatment under the 14th Amendment rather than a court-created “right to privacy.”In her interview for the appointment, Ginsburg impressed Clinton, who hailed her as the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement.Where Marshall, before he became the nation’s first African American justice, led the legal fight against racial discrimination in the 1940s and ’50s, Ginsburg led the legal fight against sex discrimination in the 1970s.“She helped us read our Constitution to understand that it protects us all,” Yale Law professor Judith Resnik said. “She brought vision, skill, intellect and kindness to the law.”Ginsburg grew up at a time when the law treated men and women differently. And though racial discrimination came to be widely seen as cruel and wrong, gender distinctions enjoyed a better reputation, at least among powerful men.“Legislators and judges, in those years, were overwhelmingly white, well-heeled and male,” Ginsburg said years later, saying they saw gender discrimination as “operating benignly in women’s favor.”Though she graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School, Ginsburg could not get an interview to be a clerk at the all-male Supreme Court and struggled to even find employment in New York