U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Penn

February 12, 2018

Amy Gutmann, Penn President, welcomed Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Penn, where she presented the University of Pennsylvania School of Law's Owen J. Roberts Memorial Lecture at the National Constitution Center. Over the course of the past 25 years, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has won renown for her service on the Supreme Court, and to the Constitution, and to our nation. Named to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1993, she has distinguished herself as a brilliant jurist, a passionate advocate for justice and equality before the law, and an astute consensus builder within the Court. She has lived the life of a pioneer. As a young woman, she left the close-knit confines of her immigrant family and community in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to attend college at Cornell, where she graduated at the top of her class. She was among just nine women allowed to enter Harvard Law School at a time when the dean asked how she could justify taking a spot from a qualified man. Far from dissuading her, such challenges to fairness galvanized a steely resolve. She went on to become the first tenured woman faculty member at Columbia Law School. Associate Justice Ginsburg is widely and justly heralded as our nation’s pre-eminent jurist of gender law. By her relentless work and formidable public intellect, she has advanced the legal status of women and the cause of justice everywhere.

Photographs by Sameer A. Khan