The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, 2020 leaves a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court and enormous uncertainty over the court’s future role in the protection of fundamental human rights. A nominee for Justice Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court should be evaluated in terms of their likely impact on access to justice for critical human rights guarantees, including the rights to life, due process, free expression, privacy, health, freedom from arbitrary detention, and freedom from discrimination. The following areas of Supreme Court decision-making–voting rights, the right to health, the right to reproductive freedom, and the interaction between religious freedom and other rights–are only some of the domains in which Justice Ginsburg’s replacement could either help to protect or weaken basic rights, with particularly significant impacts on people of color, women and girls, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. The stakes of the decision before US elected officials are tremendous. We urge senators to thoroughly review any nominee’s record on these and other issues and to question a nominee closely about key rights protections that hinge on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.