Journalism Professors Create a Portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New Documentary

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (LAW ’59) turns 85 in March but has the energy of someone half her age. She works out twice a week with a trainer in the Supreme Court gym, doing pushups and planks, and lifting weights; travels extensively for speaking engagements and opera festivals, and had a small speaking role in a 2016 Washington National Opera production of The Daughter of the Regiment.

This January, she was a star at the Sundance Film Festival, where she watched the premiere of RBG, a documentary about her life that was co-directed by Betsy West, Fred W. Friendly Professor of Professional Practice in Media and Society at Columbia’s Journalism School, and Julie Cohen (JRN’89), an adjunct in the school’s documentary program.

She was the second woman named to the Supreme Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor, and today is the longest-serving Justice. She was a lawyer fought gender discrimination for years before she was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980 and the Supreme Court in 1993. She founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union in 1972 and was the first woman to be a tenured professor at Columbia Law School, where she taught from 1972 until 1980. In her nearly 25 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has become known for her impassioned dissents in cases involving equal pay, voting rights, access to contraception, and abortion rights, among other things. She came to be widely embraced as the Notorious RBG, the title of a 2015 biography inspired by a fan blog on Tumblr.

The documentary begins with Ginsburg looking straight into the camera as she quotes 19th century abolitionist and feminist Sarah Moore Grimké, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks,” words she also quoted in her 1993 Senate confirmation hearing, after she was asked about her views on women’s rights.

In producing the film, West and Cohen interviewed more than two dozen of Ginsburg’s friends, associates and family members, as well as former President Bill Clinton, who nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993, and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

Ginsburg’s children, Jane Ginsburg, the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at Columbia Law School, and James, a classical music producer in Chicago, are also interviewed, recalling what she was like as a mother. 

“She’s this huge icon, people really love her, yet there’s this amazing back story that people just don’t know, even her big fans don’t understand the history,” said Cohen. “The other part of the story that people don’t know is a love story,” added West. “She had a surprisingly supportive husband whom she married as a very young woman, who was successful in his own right but ultimately stepped back from his career when it became clear that she was on a trajectory to become a federal judge and possibly a Justice.”

West and Cohen sat across the aisle while Ginsburg watched their film for the first time at Sundance; she hadn’t asked to see it before. When it started, with the overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville in the background, they heard her whisper to the friend sitting next to her, “Well, I like the music.” They watched as she laughed, and occasionally dabbed her eyes with a tissue. In a question and answer session afterward, Ginsburg said she was moved by the film.

The film ends with a clip from Ginsburg’s 1993 confirmation hearing. “The spirit of liberty that imbues our constitution must reside first and foremost in the hearts of the men and women who compose this great nation, a community where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest,” she said, quoting Learned Hand, a renowned federal judge of the early 20th century. “I will keep that wisdom in the front of my mind as long as I am capable of judicial service,” Ginsburg added.