For all intents and purposes, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now both a legal and pop-culture icon. Along with being a badass women’s rights activist and practically unstoppable Supreme Court justice, she’s also the heroine of…
For all intents and purposes, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now both a legal and pop-culture icon. Along with being a badass women’s rights activist and practically unstoppable Supreme Court justice, she’s also the heroine of children’s books, a beloved halloween costume for both babies and adults, the star of her own coloring book, the subject of a recent documentary film, and, lest you forget, the Notorious RBG. But exactly who coined Notorious RBG, Ginsburg’s nickname?
Ginsburg was first crowned with her now infamous Notorious RBG moniker — a play on rapper Biggie Smalls’ Notorious B. I. G. nickname — in 2013 when New York University law student Shana Knizhnik created a Tumblr bearing the name to highlight Ginsburg’s dissent in the landmark Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder.
Here’s how Ginsburg described the origin of her Notorious RBG moniker in 2017 in a video from NBC:
The name was a hit, to say the least, and as Ginsburg’s popularity and reputation grew, so too did use of her Notorious RBG nickname.
In an interview with Dahlia Lithwick of Slate in 2015, Knizhnik explained that it was the juxtaposition of Ginsburg’s small size and tremendous trailblazing force that inspired the name. “I was mostly thinking of the catchy nickname and how she was such a powerful force,” Knizhnik said. “Here you had this diminutive person, this tiny human, and nobody saw her as a badass. But when you see what she has done, over years, with such dignity and grace, it represented that.”
So, what does Ginsburg think of the moniker?
“People ask me, ‘don’t you feel uncomfortable with a name like the Notorious RBG ?,'” NBC reported Ginsburg said in February 2017. “Why should I feel uncomfortable? We have a lot in common. First and foremost, we were both born and bred in Brooklyn, New York.”
According to Biography.com, Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious B. I. G., was born in Brooklyn on May 21,1972, some 39 years after Ginsburg was born in the same borough.
In 2017, Ginsburg also told Charlie Rose she was fully aware of who Notorious B. I. G. was and thought the comparison “seems altogether natural.”
Ginsburg is reportedly such a fan of the name that, in 2014, she admitted to keeping herself well stocked with Notorious RBG t-shirts, which she reportedly gives as gifts, according to TIME magazine.
