Bob Staake’s “Icons”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second lady to be appointed to the Supreme Court docket, died on Friday, on the age of eighty-seven. Ginsburg spent almost three a long time on the nation’s highest bench, and 5 a long time as a tireless scholar, trainer, and advocate of equality. To commemorate her, the artist Bob Staake mentioned, he “wanted to consider a graphic metaphor that embodied Ginsburg’s life and legacy.” He needed one thing that was “sincere and no-nonsense,” like Ginsburg, and he landed on her lace collar, an emblem not simply of Ginsburg however, in Staake’s drawing, of ladies in every single place. For extra on Ginsburg, learn:

Jill Lepore on Ginsburg’s dissents:

Ginsburg’s dissents carried a selected energy, not solely rhetorically however politically. On the Roberts Court docket, she turned the chief of the liberal wing, and, in 2007, in a case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor for Goodyear Tires, she wrote a dissent objecting to the bulk’s denial of an argument about intercourse discrimination in employment. That opinion was so compelling that it led to the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Honest Pay Act, signed by Barack Obama in 2009. And maybe Ginsburg’s most resonant dissent, in mild of this 12 months’s election, is the one she wrote in Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, through which the bulk all however struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act, on the premise of the weird argument that it (and certainly one of its options, often known as “preclearance”) had successfully solved voter suppression for posterity. “Throwing out preclearance when it has labored and is continuous to work to cease discriminatory modifications,” Ginsburg wrote, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm as a result of you aren’t getting moist.”

Michael Schulman’s portrait of Daniel Stiepleman, Ginsburg’s nephew:

“I feel we do her a disservice once we flip her right into a superhero,” Stiepleman, thirty-seven, mentioned in his Higher West Aspect condo. Rising up, on Lengthy Island, he discovered his aunt “intimidating,” he mentioned, “since you speak to her and there’s at all times an extended silence. It took me some time to determine that that was how she communicated.” Each Thanksgiving from when he was 5 to 12, she would give him a duplicate of the U.S. Structure for Hanukkah.

And Jeffrey Toobin on the politics of filling Ginsburg’s seat:

The broad outlines of the scenario are already clear. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Chief, introduced inside hours of Ginsburg’s dying that he’ll make it possible for a Trump nominee will get a vote within the Senate this 12 months. The hypocrisy of his place is breathtaking. Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, 9 months earlier than that 12 months’s Presidential election. On that day, McConnell mentioned that he wouldn’t permit a listening to or a vote on a nominee from President Barack Obama, as a result of the following President needs to be allowed to make the selection. McConnell and his Republican colleagues had been pretty much as good as his phrase, and Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee, by no means obtained a listening to or a vote. Now, in fact, the Presidential election is lower than two months away, and McConnell has nonetheless vowed to jam via Trump’s nominee.

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