It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that 2020 dealt another blow right on the eve of the US presidential election with the death of one of the greatest legal minds of our time and unlikely pop culture icon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ginsburg’s passing gives Donald Trump the opportunity to bring the US’ highest court further to the right and imbed himself in the justice system for years to come regardless of the election outcome. Justice Ginsburg’s death therefore has the potential to wreck even more havoc on 2020.

And yet looking back on Justice Ginsburg’s life reveals how far society has come. Her life is a reminder, particularly for young lawyers, that these challenging times are not extraordinary. Each generation has faced its own COVID-19.

To help us get through the atrocities of 2020, we can look to the past and learn from those who have lived through prior adversity – including the Notorious RBG herself.

1. Don’t be afraid to be different

In 1956, Justice Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School where she was one of only nine women in a class of about 500 men. In her first year she was asked by the dean, “What are you doing occupying a seat that could be held by a man?”

Justice Ginsburg proved that she more than deserved her place by becoming the first female member of the Harvard Law Review and finishing top of her class at Columbia Law School, which she later transferred to. She did this while looking after a toddler and caring for her sick husband who was battling cancer.

Justice Ginsburg’s affinity with standing out from the pack followed her to the bench of the Supreme Court, where she became famous for her dissenting judgments.

Much like our own Kirby J, Justice Ginsburg was not afraid to speak her mind even when the majority was against her.

RBG led the way for the female law graduates of today, which now outnumber their male counterparts. However, despite the rise in graduates, sexism remains rampant in the legal industry. In Australia, women make up just 21.4 per cent of equity partners at top legal firms, 38.8 per cent of the judiciary and about 8 per cent of NSW senior counsel. Justice Ginsburg’s fight for gender equality in the profession is not yet over.

2. Pick your battles

Before her own appointment to the bench of the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg spent the 1970s fighting six landmark gender discrimination decisions before it. She spent the decade devoting herself to reshaping the US constitution and establishing that its 14th amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. She played a long game and her signature move was selecting cases that she trusted would carry public support.

Instead of asking the court to outlaw all gender discrimination in one single case, Justice Ginsburg’s strategy was to attack discriminatory laws one at a time. To achieve her end goal, she took her time, carefully selecting plaintiffs and fact scenarios that she believed would lure even a conservative bench.

In one such case, she represented a male caregiver who had been refused a tax deduction on the basis that only women were eligible. Justice Ginsburg, with the assistance of her tax lawyer husband, successfully argued that the law was unconstitutional as it wrongly assumed that only women could be caregivers. In doing so she exposed gender discrimination as being harmful to men as well as women, and thereby framed the gender discrimination argument as being in the interests of the (male) decision-makers of the day.

By moving from strength to strength with each case she won, Justice Ginsburg ultimately rewrote thousands of US laws founded in views and assumptions about gender roles that are now considered to be archaic. In doing so, she kicked off a global movement.

The UN adopted the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1979, which was ratified by Australia in 1980. This was followed by the enactment of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984. However, it wasn’t until 2013 that that act was amended to afford the same protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people.

3. You don’t need to yell to be heard

Justice Ginsburg was only five feet tall and softly spoken. In physical terms, she was easy to underestimate. Yet her size was quickly forgotten when you heard what she had to say.

She was a believer in the proposition that the way to win an argument was not to yell because it would turn people away rather than bringing them to your table. “Fight for the things you care about”, she said, “but do it in a way that will lead others to join”.

Unlike many advocates who have a tendency to preach to the converted, Justice Ginsburg was eager to engage in friendly debate with those who held starkly different views. Importantly, she believed in doing so in a way that was good-natured and harmonious. Evidence that Justice Ginsburg practised what she preached can be seen in her unlikely friendship with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with whom she vigorously disagreed on the bench and yet maintained a close friendship with outside the court.

RBG warriors

By carefully and methodically playing her hand, Justice Ginsburg restitched the fabric of western society and improved the lives of minorities in ways that are still felt today. However, the imminent replacement of Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court and strengthening of its conservative majority risk the winding back of the very civil liberties that RBG fought for.

As the next generation of lawyers, we need to take what Justice Ginsburg has taught us and finish what she started. We need to be careful about the battles we pick and tactful in how we fight them. We need to have those difficult conversations with those who see the world differently to ourselves. And we cannot fall in line and accept the status quo. Instead, we need to stray from the pack and ask ourselves “what would RBG do?”

“It’s true that not all heroes wear capes – some wear judge’s robes.”

Cassandra Taylor is a social justice lawyer, who is passionate about women’s rights, worker’s rights and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights. She is also a huge RBG fan girl.