Tributes to a ‘warrior for gender equality’

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Tributes are being paid to US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a “warrior for gender equality” who has died of cancer at the age of 87.

“There will never be another like her,” former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has tweeted.

Ginsburg was only the second woman to sit on the Supreme Court, serving for nearly three decades.

She was hailed by progressives for her passionate advocacy of women’s rights, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Within hours of the news of her death, hundreds of people had gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington DC to pay their respects.

US President Donald Trump said in a statement that Ginsburg was a “brilliant mind” who led a “remarkable life” and who demonstrated that “one can disagree without being disagreeable”.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said she was “an American hero, a giant of legal doctrine, and a relentless voice”.

Former President Bill Clinton, who appointed Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, tweeted that the US had lost “one of the most extraordinary Justices ever”, adding her “landmark opinions moved us closer to a more perfect union”.

In an interview with NPR reporter Nina Totenberg last year, Ginsburg described how the US constitution could be “powerfully hard to amend”, using the example of the suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment – ratified in 1920, it guaranteed women the right to vote – and how it “was a 75-year struggle”.

Paying tribute to Ginsburg, who was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn in 1933, Ms Totenberg tweeted about the timing of her passing, and how it coincided with Rosh Hashanah – the beginning of the Jewish New Year.