Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneering figure in the fight for womens legal equality and the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died Friday in her Washington home, surrounded by her family. She succumbed to metastatic pancreas cancer at the age of 87, the Supreme Court said.

Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague, said Chief Justice John Roberts. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew hera tireless and resolute champion of justice.

Justice Ginsburgs death leaves the court with eight members and a vacancy just 46 days before the presidential election. Just last week, President Trump added 20 more names to his list of potential Supreme Court nomineesall of whom with views sharply to the right of Justice Ginsburg. A political battle over who will fill her seat is certain to shape the final act of the contest between Mr. Trump and his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Cast by seniority to lead the high courts liberal bloc, the 1993 Clinton appointee spent her last years on the bench pushing back against an emboldened conservative majority, sometimes winning surprise victories or mitigating expected defeats by peeling off a vote from conservatives including Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh.

But it was a period more often of defeat for the liberal jurisprudence that shaped Justice Ginsburg, who attended law school and began practice during the ambitious era of the Warren Court, and which she then helped steer as a womens rights advocate in the 1970s. In recent years, she spoke most forcefully in dissent, sometimes reading from the bench, from decisions she viewed as antithetical to the social progress she believed the Constitution embraced.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Liberal Voice on Supreme Court, Dies at 87 - The Wall Street Journal