(born 1930) First woman to serve as associate justice of the US Supreme Court. She was nominated by President Reagan and sworn in as a justice on the nation’s highest court in 1981. Her influence on the court was most deeply felt in the area of 1st Amendment jurisprudence (she developed the court’s controlling standard for interpreting the establishment clause). She became one of the court’s leaders in declaring the unconstitutionality of government discrimination based on race, regardless of its goal. In 1991 she largely ended the court’s abortion debate by ruling: “the essential holding of Roe v. Wade still stands.”