Two years after her death, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal possessions are being auctioned off to raise funds for a children’s charity.
The online sale, hosted by international auction house Bonhams, features Bader Ginsburg's beaded gilt judicial collar, her wooden judge's gavel, her copy of the 1957-58 Harvard Law Review photograph, a pair of opera glasses, a cocktail shaker, an embroidered shawl, a pair of black lace gloves, an evil eye pendant and other items. The auction will close at 4 p.m., EDT, on Sept. 16.
It’s the second auction of Bader Ginsburg’s belongings organized to raise funds for SOS Children’s Village, a non-governmental, non-profit international development organization that supports children and families. Following her death on Sept. 19., 2020, her estate donated a number of her personal belongings to the organization.
Through Bonhams, SOS Children’s Villages auctioned off 162 lots of books and ephemera from the justice's private library in January 2022, raising more than US$2 million to support education and family economic empowerment through the RBG Endowment Fund.
“SOS Children’s Villages is humbled by the patronage of such an iconic figure,” Cameron Schmidt, chair of the SOS Children’s Villages U.S. board of directors, said in a media release on Sept. 7. “Justice Ginsburg worked long and passionately for her values. We hope her inspiring example will encourage engagement in this campaign and support from her admirers to continue her legacy of caring for those in need—in our case, millions of vulnerable children around the globe.”
Bader Ginsburg served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer in 2020. According to the Academy of Achievement, she was one of only nine women in her Columbia Law School graduating class of 500 students in 1959.
She went on to garner fame and widespread acclaim as a lawyer, circuit judge and Supreme Court Justice with a special interest in gender equity and women’s rights. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2002.
Among the collection of her possessions sold in the January auction were a textbook from her civil procedure class at Harvard, sheet music for the song I'll Fight, inscribed to her from Diane Warren, and her personal copy of her collected writings, My Own Words, which sold for $81,562. Her annotated copy of the 1957–58 Harvard Law Review sold for $100,000, well over the pre-sale estimate of $2,500 to $3,500. In all, the auction raised $2.3 million.
"Handling this library was a career-high moment for me,” Catherine Williamson, head of Bonhams’ book department, said in a media release on the auction house’s website on Jan. 27.
“It's richly rewarding to see the larger community respond as enthusiastically to Justice Ginsburg as we at Bonhams did internally.”
