U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in office in 2020 at age 87, is to be featured on a commemorative Forever Stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. With a first-day-of-issue ceremony at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery on Oct. 2, her image, modeled on an oil painting of her wearing her black judicial robe and one of her signature lacy collars, will be available for purchase through the Postal Service’s online store.
The question is: Why Ginsburg?
Of the 116 men and women who have served on the Supreme Court since it first convened in 1790, only 14 have been honored with commemorative stamps. Six of those were chief justices, including John Marshall (1755–1835), whose landmark deciding opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) established the Supreme Court’s power (along with other federal courts) to interpret the Constitution and to declare federal and state laws unconstitutional if it deemed them so.
By contrast, the Supreme Court’s first black justice, late Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, who served from 1967 to 1991, received a commemorative stamp, but only in 2003, 10 years after his death in 1993. Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the high court, appointed in 1916, died in 1941 but wasn’t honored with a stamp until 2009.
Ginsburg wasn’t even the first woman to win a Supreme Court seat. That was now-retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O‘Connor, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and serving until 2006. (Ms. O’Connor is still alive at age 93, however, so she technically doesn’t qualify.)
Postal Service guidelines state that a person must have made “extraordinary and enduring contributions to American society, history, culture or environment” in order to qualify for a stamp. But Ginsburg, although she had a notable career as a professor, women’s rights litigator, and federal judge before ascending to the Supreme Court, wrote no landmark law-changing opinions while she was there.
The closest that she came was her authorship of a 7–1 majority opinion in U.S. v. Virginia (1996), striking down a males-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute, a state institution. The Supreme Court had previously either banned or drastically restricted single-sex higher education in earlier cases involving public universities, so the Virginia Military Institute case was scarcely a game-changer.
Instead, Ginsburg is remembered mainly for her “blistering dissents,” as the media called them, in which she headed the losing liberal opposition to conservative Supreme Court majorities.
For example, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), a 5–4 decision in which the Supreme Court majority ruled that former Goodyear employee Lilly Ledbetter couldn’t collect damages for alleged wage discrimination because she hadn’t filed her complaint in a timely fashion, Ginsburg’s dissent blasted the majority for being “indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014), the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that a family corporation whose owners opposed abortion on religious grounds couldn’t be forced under Obamacare to provide its employees at no cost with “morning-after” and other contraceptives that sometimes act as abortifacients. Ginsburg argued that decisions regarding which contraceptives an employer should be required to subsidize should “be the woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults.”
Ginsburg wrote one of her most scathing dissents in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania only months before her death in 2020. In that case, a 7–2 majority of the justices had ruled that the Trump administration had the authority to carve out a religious exemption that allowed a Catholic order of nuns to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees on grounds of conscience.
“Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree,” Ginsburg wrote.
“This Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.”
It thus seems clear that Ginsburg received her commemorative stamp—in record time following her death—mostly, perhaps solely, because she was a liberal icon. Indeed, during her last years, she became known as “the Notorious RBG,” idolized in feminist circles. Central to her appeal was her assurance from the very beginning of her Supreme Court tenure that she would be a reliable vote for unrestricted abortion rights.
“It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling,” she told senators at her 1993 confirmation hearing.
The Postal Service has generally skewed liberal in its selection of Supreme Court justices for commemorative stamps. The famously liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren, who died in 1974, and Associate Justice William Brennan Jr., who died in 1997, both have stamps in their honor, but it’s unlikely that the faces of famously conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, or famously conservative Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, will ever appear on stamps.
Still, the Postal Service’s hasty selection for public celebration of the maximally ideological Ginsburg—during the year before an election in which abortion is certain to be a major national issue—ought to raise a few eyebrows even among liberals.
