Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court

Justice Ginsburg Gets Best Shirt Ever For Her Birthday

Justice Ginsburg is 82! And the E.D.N.Y. got her a little present that screams Brooklyn.

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Justice Ginsburg is making the rounds to celebrate her 82nd birthday which happened over the weekend. Let’s all sing Happy Birthday to You that terrible, yet copyright-free birthday anthem! Yesterday, she stopped by the borough of her birth to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Eastern District of New York and probably grab a decent slice while she was at it. But as one might expect, celebrating a jurisdiction isn’t nearly as much fun as celebrating a real, live Supreme Court justice and the festivities drifted back toward the diminutive jurist’s 82nd. I mean, what do you buy the jurisdiction that has everything? The S.D.N.Y.’s cred isn’t for sale.

Chief Judge Carol Amon presented Justice Ginsburg with a little gift from the E.D.N.Y., to solidify Justice Ginsburg’s cult hipster status in Brooklyn — an ironic T-shirt. Specifically, this gem available at Lookhuman.

You can see Justice Ginsburg holding up the shirt with pride in this picture from the New York Daily News (which supplements its flagging old-media revenues with copyright suits, so we’ll just link to this instead).

While speaking before the crowd of legal luminaries, Justice Ginsburg was quick to remind everyone that she’s still able to do her job at 82 years young by calling out the 93-year-old dean of E.D.N.Y. judges.

“He was my evidence teacher” at Columbia University Law School, Ginsburg said. She said no one has served on the bench with more zeal than the “indomitable” Weinstein.

The event served as yet another reminder of the gradual and unlikely transformation of Justice Ginsburg into a cultural phenomenon. As Dahlia Lithwick writes in the amazingly titled Justice LOLZ Grumpycat Notorious R.B.G.:

Still, Ginsburg’s public image—to the extent she had one—remained gentle, collegial, and generally small. That image only really turned upside-down very recently when a cadre of young women began to paint her as—to use the Internet search term now almost irrevocably tied to her name—a “badass.” The Ginsburg social media revolution came about in 2013, after she fired off yet more heated opinions in a Texas affirmative action case called Fisher v. University of Texas and in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder, which drove a stake through the heart of the Voting Rights Act. That’s when NYU law student Shana Knizhnik launched the Notorious R.B.G. Tumblr, likening the tiny jurist to the rapper Notorious B.I.G., and suddenly a Tumblr/T-shirt/bumper sticker revolution was born. Ginsburg, like Lara Croft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was a force to be reckoned with.

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Lithwick’s article profiles a number of other solid Ginsburg T-shirts, but let’s be honest, nothing’s going to top the R.B.G./A Few Good Men mashup.

If the genealogy of Justice Ginsburg’s transformation really does, as Lithwick suggests, begin with the departure of Justice O’Connor, who will be there to sate the meme-based needs of Supreme Court nerds everywhere?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was also in attendance. “We call her ‘Sonny from the Bronx’ and she (Sotomayor) has been given Eastern District of New York citizenship,” Amon quipped.

Thanks, Judge Amon!

‘You Can’t Handle The Ruth’: Ruth Bader Ginsburg given funny T-shirt at Brooklyn court for Eastern District celebration [New York Daily News]
Justice LOLZ Grumpycat Notorious R.B.G. [Slate]

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