U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will receive the American Bar Association Medal — the highest honor conferred by the association — during the 2010 ABA Annual Meeting next month in San Francisco.
“Justice Ginsburg has shown a steadfast commitment to preserving and advancing individual rights that is ever-more crucial in our modern world, where issues of security, technological advances, global business and personal relationships, and world governance issues all have the potential to impinge on personal liberties,” said ABA President Carolyn Lamm in announcing the selection.
“Our nation’s founders carefully crafted a balance in establishing our system of governance,” Lamm continued. “Throughout the history of our country, generations have been challenged to protect that balance.
Lamm said Ginsburg “is one of today’s champions of that balance, and of protecting our constitutional form of government. Justice Ginsburg has demonstrated her brilliance, keen legal analytical ability and elegance on the court, contributing significantly to the development of our country’s jurisprudence.”
Lamm said the ABA was honored to recognize Ginsburg’s “immense contribution to the rule of law, both in the United States and on the world stage.”
Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 after having served 13 years as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Before her appointment as a federal judge, she was a professor at Columbia University School of Law and at the School of Law at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in Newark.
She also was general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, served on its national board, and was counsel to the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, coinciding with her teaching at Columbia.
While active with the ACLU, she argued six cases before the Supreme Court and submitted briefs in 18 more.
Among her many other public service activities, Ginsburg served on the Council of the American Law Institute, the Board of Editors of the ABA Journal, the Executive Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ginsburg clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Edmund L. Palmieri in the Southern District of New York, immediately after receiving her law degree from Columbia Law School.
The medal, to be presented during the meeting of the ABA House of Delegates on Aug. 9, is given to an individual judged by the association’s Board of Governors to have rendered exceptionally distinguished service to the cause of American jurisprudence.
It was established in 1929, and only three other women have been recipients: Shirley M. Hufstedler, a former U.S. secretary of education and appellate court judge in both state and federal systems; Sandra Day O’Connor, former U.S. Supreme Court; and Patricia M. Wald, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and formerly a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
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