Faculty Teaching in Venice
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1993 - present) was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933. She attended Cornell University, graduating with a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Beta Phi. She then attended law school, first at Harvard (1956-1958), then at Columbia (1958-1959). She received her law degree in 1959. Ginsburg worked as a law clerk for Edmund Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Ginsburg spent several years in academic posts at Columbia and Rutgers Universities, studying international law and becoming expert in Swedish jurisprudence; she became the first woman hired with tenure at Columbia Law School in 1972. In the same year she became the first director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Women's Rights Project. She became General Counsel of the ACLU the following year, a position she retained until her appointment to the United States Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
During her time as a professor and ACLU counsel, Ginsburg worked to advance various feminist causes, although often doing so by taking male plaintiffs to demonstrate that given laws had a disparate or differential impact. In Reed v. Reed (1971) Ginsburg helped to write the ACLU brief; the Supreme Court's ruling in that case struck down an Idaho law that preferred men to women as executors of estates. Her most famous case promoting gender-equity was Weinberger v. Weisenfeld (1975), in which she appeared as counsel for a young widower, Stephen Weisenfeld. Weisenfeld, whose wife had been the couple's principal support, was denied Social Security survivor benefits at the same rate a woman would have received. The crucial part of the ruling stated: "[b]y providing dissimilar treatment for men and women who are…similarly situated, the challenged section violates the [Due Process] Clause."
Ginsburg argued six cases before the Supreme Court, winning five, during her ACLU tenure. She was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1980. In 1993, with the retirement of Justice Byron White, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the open post on the U.S. Supreme Court. She was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 97-3.
Professor Marty Ginsburg
Professor Ginsburg specializes in teaching tax at the Georgetown Law Center. His numerous professional activities in the tax field include positions as chair of the Committee on Simplification of the American Bar Associations Tax Section, chair of the New York State Bar Association's Tax Section, and consultant to the American Law Institute's Federal Income Tax Project. He has also served as a member of advisory groups to the Committee of Internal Revenue and the Tax Division of the Department of Justice. Before moving to Washington in 1980 when his wife got a good job here, Professor Ginsburg was the Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia University. He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the spring of 1978, at Harvard in the spring of 1986, at Chicago in the spring of 1990, and at New York University in the spring of 1993. Professor Ginsburg is co-author, with Jack S. Levin of Chicago, of Mergers, Acquisitions, and Buyouts, a semi-annually updated treatise which addresses tax and other aspects of this exciting subject.
