The writer is dean of Stanford Law School

The death of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been met with widespread grief and shock, even though her passing at the age of 87 was not a surprise given her repeated bouts of cancer and other health problems in recent years. Still, at barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, the tiny jurist had seemed indestructible because of her dignified fierceness.  

Only the second woman ever to serve on the highest US court, Ginsburg had established herself as one of the most important constitutional lawyers of her generation even before she was elevated to the bench. As a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, she won a series of landmark cases establishing that the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” not only prohibited racial discrimination but also protected women’s rights to be treated equally.