Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Enneagram Type 1 and the Discipline of Dissent

Why no law firm would hire Ruth Bader Ginsburg

At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg, and she told the story the same way for the next sixty years: he was the first boy who cared that she had a brain. Not noticed it. Cared about it. They married in 1954, the summer she finished college.

Harvard Law came next, and with it a class of about five hundred that held nine women. The dean, Erwin Griswold, sat the women down at a dinner and asked each to justify the seat she was taking from a man. Ginsburg gave a mortified, polite answer and swallowed the rest. She put the humiliation where she put everything: into the work.

Then Marty, a year ahead of her, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. She sat in on his classes and attended her own, typed his senior paper from dictation, cared for their toddler daughter, and still made the Harvard Law Review on almost no sleep. She never told it as a hardship. She told it as arithmetic. It needed doing, so she did it.

When Marty recovered and took a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia and tied for first in her class, the first woman to make law review at both schools. Twelve firms interviewed her. None hired her. Three strikes, she called it: a woman, a mother, and Jewish. A professor finally strong-armed a federal judge into taking her as a clerk by threatening to send him no more Columbia graduates.

This is the stretch people skip on the way to the robe. Before she was the lawyer who took sex discrimination apart clause by clause, she had been its object, standing at a dean's table explaining why she deserved a chair. The fury in her dissents was never theoretical. Someone had handed her the rejection letter first.

How Ruth Bader Ginsburg won women's rights by defending men

By the early 1970s Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a problem most reformers would have solved with volume. Sex discrimination was legal, ordinary, and everywhere, and the Supreme Court had never struck a law down for it. A Type 1 with less discipline would have marched in and demanded the whole edifice fall at once.

She did the opposite. As co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project, she built a strategy so patient it looked, from outside, like caution. She would win small, correct cases in a deliberate order, and use the ruling from each to make the next argument slightly larger. She also picked her plaintiffs with cold precision. Many of them were men.

It started with a woman. In Reed v. Reed (1971), she wrote the brief that got the Court, for the first time in its history, to strike down a law for treating men and women differently. Idaho had automatically preferred fathers over mothers as estate administrators. The ruling was narrow and the reasoning was thin, and Ginsburg treated that thin reasoning as a foundation stone. Each later case pressed the Court to build one story higher on it.

Then she turned to the men. Stephen Wiesenfeld was a widower denied the Social Security survivor benefits a widow would have received. Her bet was that a bench of male judges who could not imagine being a discriminated-against woman could imagine being a shortchanged widower. She had been that unimaginable woman once, at a dean's dinner table.

So she fought for the man to free the woman. The laws she targeted were dressed up as favors to women. What they did was chain women to dependence on men, and she picked the plaintiffs who would expose that.

In her first oral argument, in 1973, she closed by borrowing a line from the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, written in 1837: "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks." It was the whole method in one sentence. No favor. No leap. Just the removal, one law at a time, of the thing standing on the neck.

When President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993, he called her "the Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law." The comparison was exact. Like Marshall, she had not shouted the law into changing. She had litigated it there, case by case, until the ground had shifted under everyone's feet and no one could quite say when.

Her 1996 majority opinion in United States v. Virginia forced the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. She conceded openly that "inherent differences" between men and women exist, then ruled that those differences can never justify "denigration" or "artificial constraints" on what a person is allowed to become. Even winning big, she refused to overclaim. She gave the other side its true point and won anyway.

Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissents aloud

A justice who disagrees usually files a written dissent and lets it sit in the record. Ginsburg, on the decisions that angered her most, did something pointed: she read the dissent from the bench, out loud, so the room and the press would feel the weight of it.

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007), the Court told a woman she had waited too long to sue over years of underpayment she had no way of knowing about. Ginsburg read her dissent aloud and ended with an instruction: "The ball is in Congress's court... to correct this Court's parsimonious reading of Title VII." Two years later Congress did exactly that, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill President Obama signed. She had lost the case and won the law.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act, reasoning that it had worked so well it was no longer needed. Ginsburg's dissent handed the century its sharpest image: "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

That line is why an 80-year-old jurist became a meme. A second-year NYU law student named Shana Knizhnik read the Shelby dissent, started a Tumblr, and christened her the Notorious RBG, after the rapper Notorious B.I.G. Ginsburg loved it. She kept a stack of Notorious RBG shirts to give away. The reformer who trusted process had, almost by accident, become a folk hero for her rage, the one emotion she had spent her life refusing to perform.

The unlikely friendship that defined Ruth Bader Ginsburg

For twenty years, on New Year's Eve, the Ginsburgs rang in the year with the Scalias.

Antonin Scalia was her opposite on nearly every question the law could pose. He read the Constitution the way she read a grocery list she distrusted. They fought in ink, in decision after decision, and off the bench they were, in her word, "best buddies." They shared a love of opera. An actual opera was written about them. Scalia, asked what he made of her, gave the answer of a man who adored someone he could not out-argue into agreement: "What's not to like... except her views of the law, of course?"

This is where a Type 1 usually cracks, and where Ginsburg did not. The reformer's occupational hazard is turning the moral yardstick on people, sorting the world into the righteous and the wrong. She refused. "You can disagree without being disagreeable," she said, and she lived inside that sentence for decades of friendship with a man whose legal philosophy she considered a threat to everything she had built.

The other place her control loosened was physical, and it was scheduled. Twice a week from 1999 on, she trained with Bryant Johnson, planks and squats and full push-ups, straight through cancer treatment. "When I started, I looked like a survivor of Auschwitz," she said. "Now I'm up to 20 push-ups." At her memorial, Johnson walked to her casket and did push-ups beside it. The discipline she had aimed at every brief she also aimed at her own body, and it held her upright long past the point most people would have sat down.

Why RBG refused to retire

Marty Ginsburg died in June 2010, after fifty-six years of marriage. He had been her fiercest champion: the gourmet who cooked every family dinner, the tax lawyer who quietly ran the campaign to put his wife on the Supreme Court. In the drawer by his hospital bed she found a note on a yellow legal pad. "My dearest Ruth," it read. "You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids." The morning after he died she was back on the bench, announcing an opinion, because he would have wanted her at work. Work was what she had left.

The choice that grief set up is the one her admirers still argue about, and the one the Enneagram explains best.

By 2013 and 2014, with a Democratic president and Senate in place, many on the left urged Ginsburg to retire while her replacement could be confirmed by allies. She was in her eighties. She had survived cancer more than once. The strategic move was obvious. She would not make it.

The easy reading is ego, or a miscalculation about her own health. The truer reading is Type 1. Retiring on a political clock, timing your exit to game a confirmation, is exactly the kind of results-over-principle bargaining she had refused her entire life. She believed she should be judged on the work, at full strength, for as long as she could do it correctly. Stepping down as a maneuver would have felt like the compromise she had built a sixty-year career on never making.

You do not have to agree with the choice to understand it. It was not the reformer failing. It was the reformer's deepest principle, patience and integrity over tactics, pointed at the one problem where patience was the wrong tool.

There is a bitter symmetry in it. The woman who won by inches, who never overreached, who trusted the long game in every courtroom she entered, gambled the last decade of her seat on her own body outlasting a Senate calendar. It was the least incremental decision of her life, made by the most incremental mind on the Court.

She died on September 18, 2020, of complications from pancreatic cancer, at 87. Days earlier she had dictated a statement to her granddaughter, Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

The wish was not honored. Her seat was filled 39 days later by Amy Coney Barrett, locking in a 6 to 3 conservative majority. Two years after that, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, that Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The half-century of precedent Ginsburg had spent her life extending was undone, in part, by the vote of the woman who took the chair she would not leave.

The Court she left behind

The Court that sits today is, in a real sense, the one her death made. Every 6 to 3 ruling runs through the 39 days after September 18, 2020.

Read her Shelby dissent again with that in mind. Throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. She meant it about voting law. It turned out to describe the seat itself: the protection you assume is permanent, discarded at the exact moment it was still working, and the rain that came the instant it was gone.

She trusted the slow, correct process to outlast any single storm. It was the one bet, in a life of careful bets, that the weather did not honor.