Council Member Mark Levine is hoping to rename a street near Columbia University “RBG Way,” after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away on Friday, September 18.
RBG was from Brooklyn, but she spent some of her formative years in Manhattan–living at 404 W 116 St. It was here that she emerged as a fierce fighter for equal rights under the law.
This legacy should be honored. We’re introducing legislation to co-name the street “RBG Way”. pic.twitter.com/BKoIn7PBw8
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) September 22, 2020
Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959, tying for first in the class.
In 1972, RBG became the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School. Here, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project “in order to challenge laws that treated the sexes differently,” states a memoriam by Columbia Law School.
The memoriam also honors the late justice’s achievements of arguing six landmark supreme court cases successfully and overseeing more than 300 sex discrimination cases on the ACLU’s women’s rights docket – all while teaching full time at Columbia.
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Columbia University’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, also released the following statement following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death:
Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:
I join everyone in mourning the loss of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was also one of our most cherished alumnae and faculty colleagues. To be a reformer within an established tradition—and to make the tradition truer to its own principles and premises—is exceedingly difficult and rare in human affairs. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was such a person.
She challenged and changed the legal system, especially with regard to matters of gender equality, deploying the finest of legal skills, and in doing so validated the law while making it immeasurably better. Throughout her life and career she exhibited the essence of courage and the belief that reason and ideas can, indeed, improve the world. We grieve this loss, especially at this moment.
Sincerely,
Lee C. Bollinger
We’ll provide an update once we know more about the potential street renaming.
