Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy is one of hope for social justice

Editorial: The death of the feminist US Supreme Court justice has triggered a political battle, but she leaves lasting achievements

Justice Ginsburg greets Barack Obama before his State of the Union address in 2012 (Getty)

When asked at what point there would be enough women on the nine-member US Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg replied: “When there are nine.” An all-female Supreme Court? Why not, she asked. “Nine men was a satisfactory number until 1981.”

The death of Justice Ginsburg is of immediate political significance because it gives Donald Trump the chance to rush through the nomination of a conservative judge, which would entrench the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, turning a five-to-four majority into a six-to-three one.  

Already, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, has reversed his position from when Antonin Scalia died just before the 2016 election. Then, he said: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Now, he says precisely the opposite, stripping away another layer from the fiction that US legal appointments are anything other than intensely party-political.