Ruth Bader Ginsburg stamp to be issued in October

The first Monday of October will not only bring a new Supreme Court term but also a new U.S. postage stamp for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg’s stamp will officially be issued Oct. 2 at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. NPR’s Nina Totenberg and Ginsburg’s granddaughter Clara Spera are listed among the speakers at the first-day event, according to Linn’s Stamp News.

Ginsburg, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, served on the nation’s top court from 1993 until her death in September 2020. She was the court’s second female justice, after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The United States does not issue stamps honoring living people, though living people have sometimes been seen on stamps that were meant to highlight specific events, topics or even movie franchises. But, except for former presidents (who are typically memorialized within a year of their deaths), the soonest that a person is ever honored on one of the nation’s postage stamps is three years after they die.

This year, that time frame was true not only of Ginsburg but also civil rights activist John Lewis (1940-2020), whose stamp was issued in July.

Relatively few American stamps have depicted Supreme Court justices, though John Marshall, the court’s longest-serving chief justice, has been honored with multiple stamps through the decades. That’s also true of William Howard Taft, though he also served as president of the United States.

The court’s first African American justice, Thurgood Marshall, was recognized in 2003 as part of the USPS’s annual Black Heritage series. In 2009, four former justices — Joseph Story, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and William Brennan — were saluted together on a souvenir sheet.

The Ginsburg stamp was designed by portrait artist Michael Deas and is good for use indefinitely on any first-class domestic mail.