US Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away Friday night at her home in Washington DC. She was 87.
Ginsburg died of complications relating to metastatic pancreatic cancer.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010. She is survived by her children Jane and James Ginsburg.
The oldest serving Supreme Court justice at the time of her death, Ginsburg had suffered a spate of health problems, leading to multiple hospitalizations in recent years.
A Clinton-appointee, Ginsburg served on the court since 1993, and was at the time of her death one of the court’s four Democratic-appointed justices, and the longest-serving of the four liberal justices.
President Donald Trump said he would nominate a woman to fill the vacancy left by Ginsburg’s passing.
The president vowed to act “without delay” in nominating a new justice, while challenger Joe Biden said the choice should wait until after this year’s presidential election.
If Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate are able to choose a new justice before the election, it will mark the first radical change in the court’s ideological makeup in decades, giving Republicans the opportunity to replace one of the court’s most venerable liberal justices with a conservative judge, shifting the narrow five-four majority to a six-three majority.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a statement eulogizing Ginsburg as one of the "great judicial leaders of our time."
"I join the American people in mourning the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the great judicial leaders of our time. She was proud of her Jewish heritage and the Jewish people will always be proud of her."