The Ginsburgs Are Inducted Into IP Hall of Fame
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg '59 and Columbia Law School Professor Jane C. Ginsburg Are Both Recognized for Leading Women into the Field of Intellectual Property Law
New York, November 3, 2015—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 and her daughter, Columbia Law School Professor Jane C. Ginsburg, were inducted into the ChIPs Hall of Fame at an Oct. 27 Women in IP Global Summit in Washington, D.C.
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| Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59, left, and her daughter, Columbia Law School Professor Jane C. Ginsburg, were both honored for their contributions to the field of intellectual property law. |
The Ginsburgs were honored for their significant individual contributions to the field of intellectual property law and their demonstrated commitment to the advancement of women in IP and technology careers. ChIPs is a decade-old group that was started by seven female chief counsels of patents and intellectual property at Silicon Valley companies. Its mission is to promote women in the high-tech industry.
The Ginsburgs each have deep ties to Columbia Law School.
As Columbia Law School’s first tenured female professor, Justice Ginsburg fought many well-known battles for gender equality. The fight began, however, with a deeply personal career challenge. Though she had graduated in 1959 at the top of her class at Columbia Law School, and served as an editor of the Columbia Law Review, she found the best jobs were off-limits to women. She ended up clerking for a judge—a 1929 graduate of the Law School—before embarking on a long career advocating for ordinary people caught in the vise of gender discrimination. She won five of the six gender discrimination cases she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
When she returned to Columbia Law School as a professor in 1972, Justice Ginsburg had taught courses at Rutgers and helped found the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Within two years, she published the seminal casebook on the new subject of sex-based discrimination. Justice Ginsburg was, in the words of her late Columbia Law School colleague Professor Hans Smit ’58, “the only member of the faculty who taught the law that she created.” In 1980, she was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Jimmy Carter, and, in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
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| The Ginsburgs accepting their honors from ChIPS, a group dedicated to the advancement, development and retention of women in the field of patent and intellectual property law. |
Jane C. Ginsburg, the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, is the longtime co-director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School, which contributes to a broader understanding of the legal aspects of creative works of authorship, including their dissemination and use. In addition to her role as a professor, she has published many works, including three casebooks and numerous articles on domestic and international copyright law. Professor Ginsburg is also a vice president of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale—a Paris-based international organization created to promote and defend authors’ rights—and president of that organization’s U.S. chapter.
She serves on the editorial boards of several intellectual property journals, and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
The ChIPs Hall of Fame was started in 2013; information on inductees can be viewed here.