About This Stamp
With this stamp, the U.S. Postal Service honors Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), the 107th Supreme Court Justice of the United States. After beginning her career as an activist lawyer fighting gender discrimination, Ginsburg became a respected jurist whose important opinions advancing gender equality and strong dissents on socially controversial rulings expressed her passionate advocacy of equal justice under law and made her an icon of American culture.
The stamp art is an oil painting of Ginsburg showing her facing the viewer in her black judicial robe and an intricate white collar.
In 1956, after graduating from Cornell University, Ginsburg studied at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in her class. Despite encountering blatant sexism, she landed a prestigious position with the Harvard Law Review. She completed her legal education at Columbia University in 1959. Her search for a job began with difficulty, as big law firms at the time were disinclined to hire a Jewish woman with a child, but a federal judge was persuaded to offer her a clerkship.
In 1963, Ginsburg accepted a teaching position at Rutgers Law School. She soon became an expert on anti-discrimination and equal protection law and became a trailblazer in the field. In 1971, under the auspices of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Ginsburg took the lead in writing the appellant brief in a case contesting a statute giving men precedence over women in administering the estates of the deceased in Idaho. Ginsburg’s brief convinced a unanimous Supreme Court to reverse a previous decision by the Idaho Supreme Court and strike down a state law that discriminated on the basis of sex.
In 1972, Ginsburg began teaching at Columbia Law School, where she was hired as the school's first female tenured law professor. She also co-founded and co-directed the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and played a key role in equal protection cases. Often representing male plaintiffs to demonstrate how discrimination could harm men as well as women, Ginsburg was involved in dozens of cases that went before the Supreme Court. She argued six of them personally, and won five of those cases.
By 1980, Ginsburg was determined to bring about change from the other side of the bench. In April of that year, she was nominated by President Carter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. During her 13 years on the court, she gained a reputation for intellectual rigor, collegiality, and moderation.
On June 14, 1993, President Clinton nominated Ginsburg to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg’s first years on the court were characterized by focused opinions, moderate dissents, and active questioning of attorneys during oral arguments. Although in the majority for several key cases, she took on the role of chief dissenter as the court became more conservative in the early 2000s. After a 2007 decision upholding a federal partial-birth abortion ban, she took the unusual step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench, a practice she continued with greater frequency during her second decade on the court. As a result of her dissents, Ginsburg became even more widely known as a defender of equal justice.
Ginsburg’s multifaceted legacy includes the legal and social changes she helped to bring about; the example she set of tenacity and perseverance in the service of meaningful work; the inspiring passion that she brought to her dissents; and the countless people, young and old, men and women, who view her as a role model for their own lives.
Art director Ethel Kessler designed this stamp with art by Michael J. Deas based on a photograph by Philip Bermingham.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp in panes of 20. This Forever stamp is always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director
Ethel Kessler
Ethel Kessler is an award-winning designer and art director who has worked with corporations, museums, public and private institutions, professional service organizations, and now, the United States Postal Service.
After earning a B.F.A. in visual communications from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kessler worked as a graphic designer and project manager for the exhibits division of the United States Information Agency. Her work was distributed internationally on subjects such as Immigration, Entrepreneurship, Renovation of American Cities, and the Bicentennial of 1976. She was also responsible for exhibits in Morocco, Botswana, and El Salvador.
In 1981, she established Kessler Design, Inc., for which she is creative director and designer. Clients have included the Clinton Government reorganization, the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Television, the National Park Service, and the American Institute of Architects.
She has been an art director for the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp development program for more than 25 years. As an art director for USPS, Kessler has been responsible for creating more than 500 stamp designs, including the Breast Cancer Research stamp illustrated by Whitney Sherman. Issued in 1998, the stamp is still on sale and has raised more $98 million for breast cancer research. Other Kessler projects include the popular and highly regarded Nature of America 120 stamp series, a collaboration with nationally acclaimed nature illustrator John Dawson, the 12-year Lunar New Year series with Kam Mak, the American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes 10 stamps issued in 2003, a 2016 pane of stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and the 2023 stamp honoring Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And many, many others.
Stamp Artist
Michael J. Deas
Michael J. Deas, an award-winning illustrator and master realist artist, was raised in suburban New Orleans and Long Island, New York. Although he took art classes as a young man, paying for them by working as an illustrator of novels and children’s books, he considers himself to be essentially self-taught.
For more than twenty-five years, Deas has created stamp images for the Postal Service™. His 1995 portrait of Marilyn Monroe was one of the top selling commemorative stamps ever. Since then, he has created twenty other portraits for stamps, among them Thomas Wolfe (2000), Audrey Hepburn (2003), Ronald Reagan (2005), Edgar Allan Poe (2009), George H.W. Bush (2019), and most recently Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2023).
The Society of Illustrators has recognized his works with five gold medals and two silver. Two of the gold medals were awarded for stamp designs: James Dean (Legends of Hollywood, 1996), and Thornton Wilder (Literary Arts, 1997). In 2004, Deas received the Hamilton King Award, given for the single best illustration of the year.
In 2012-13, forty of his original paintings, drawings, and illustrations were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. In the late nineties, Deas was one of seven artists whose works were featured in “Visual Solutions—Seven Illustrators and the Creative Process,” at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In addition to his artwork, Deas is a noted authority on Edgar Allan Poe. His 1989 book, The Portraits & Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe, documents more than seventy historic images of the poet and is now considered a standard reference work.
Over the years, clients have included TIME magazine (six covers), Columbia Pictures (redesign of the well known lady with a torch logo), Reader’s Digest, Random House, HarperCollins, Sports Illustrated, as well as a number of prominent advertising agencies.
Today, Deas works from his studio in the historic district of New Orleans.