Dear Justice Ginsburg,
We think we speak for all of us when we say, thank you. Thank you for deciding to go to law school with Marty even though you already had a toddler at home. Thank you for your brilliant legal mind, your dedication, and your scholarly abilities that you put to good use, pushing you to the top of your law school class while caring for a toddler, and a husband with cancer.
Thank you for persisting in the law through academia when no law firm would hire you, despite your exemplary academic record, because you were a Jewish woman and a mother. Thank you for your endless devotion to women’s equality first through your legal advocacy at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, and later on the bench.
Thank you for the right to have our own credit cards. Thank you for the right to have a mortgage in our own names. Thank you for the right to do anything we want without our husbands’ permission. Thank you for the right to equal pay. Thank you for the right to equal employment. It is hard to believe that we didn’t have any of these things just a few decades ago.
Thank you for embodying the idea that even though the road is long, the only thing we can do is push forward. We can be the smartest in the room. We can be the quietest in the room, or we can be the loudest with our writing. We can get things done. Thank you (and Justice Scalia) for showing all of us through your friendship that Constitutional issues do not have to be political, and they do not have to erase our humanity.
Thank you for staying on the bench for 27 years. You must have been exhausted. But most of all, thank you for what you’ve done for women everywhere, for our mothers, for us, for our daughters, and for many generations of women to come.
Rest in Peace. Rest in Power.
-Montage Legal Group