Bob Staake’s “Icons”

Image may contain Armor

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, died on Friday, at the age of eighty-seven. Ginsburg spent nearly three decades on the country’s highest bench, and five decades as a tireless scholar, teacher, and advocate of equality. To commemorate her, the artist Bob Staake said, he “needed to think of a graphic metaphor that embodied Ginsburg’s life and legacy.” He wanted something that was “honest and no-nonsense,” like Ginsburg, and he landed on her lace collar, a symbol not just of Ginsburg but, in Staake’s drawing, of women everywhere. For more on Ginsburg, read:

Jill Lepore on Ginsburg’s dissents:

Ginsburg’s dissents carried a particular power, not only rhetorically but politically. On the Roberts Court, she became the leader of the liberal wing, and, in 2007, in a case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor for Goodyear Tires, she wrote a dissent objecting to the majority’s denial of an argument about sex discrimination in employment. That opinion was so compelling that it led to the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed by Barack Obama in 2009. And perhaps Ginsburg’s most resonant dissent, in light of this year’s election, is the one she wrote in Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, in which the majority all but struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act, on the basis of the bizarre argument that it (and one of its features, known as “preclearance”) had effectively solved voter suppression for posterity. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” Ginsburg wrote, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Michael Schulman’s portrait of Daniel Stiepleman, Ginsburg’s nephew:

“I think we do her a disservice when we turn her into a superhero,” Stiepleman, thirty-seven, said in his Upper West Side apartment. Growing up, on Long Island, he found his aunt “intimidating,” he said, “because you talk to her and there’s always a long silence. It took me a while to figure out that that was how she communicated.” Every Thanksgiving from when he was five to twelve, she would give him a copy of the U.S. Constitution for Hanukkah.

And Jeffrey Toobin on the politics of filling Ginsburg’s seat:

The broad outlines of the situation are already clear. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced within hours of Ginsburg’s death that he will make sure that a Trump nominee gets a vote in the Senate this year. The hypocrisy of his position is breathtaking. Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, nine months before that year’s Presidential election. On that day, McConnell said that he would not allow a hearing or a vote on a nominee from President Barack Obama, because the next President should be allowed to make the choice. McConnell and his Republican colleagues were as good as his word, and Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee, never received a hearing or a vote. Now, of course, the Presidential election is less than two months away, and McConnell has nevertheless vowed to jam through Trump’s nominee.

Find Bob Staake’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.