- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
While teaching law at Rutgers in the 1960s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg discovered that she was paid less than her male colleagues and joined a successful equal pay campaign. Prompted by that experience, she began handling sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. She came to believe that men and women would create new traditions by their own actions if artificial barriers were removed and opportunities held open to them.
She was not the first to push the ACLU in this direction. Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon, long-serving members of its board, had worked for years to put gender equality on the organisation's agenda, and in 1970 they persuaded the board to drop its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. Even so, as one early staff attorney later recalled, the ACLU of the early 1970s was lukewarm about women's rights, and it took Ginsburg's vision and leadership to create a dedicated project.
After her brief in Reed v. Reed persuaded the Supreme Court in 1971 to apply the Equal Protection Clause to sex discrimination, the ACLU's Women's Rights Project was born in 1972 under her leadership. The legal director, Mel Wulf, recruited Brenda Feigen, who had just helped Gloria Steinem launch Ms. magazine, as co-director. The two found an unused corner of the ACLU office and hung up a sign reading "WOMEN WORKING". Ginsburg became general counsel in 1973 and joined the ACLU board in 1974, and by then the project and related ACLU efforts had taken part in more than 300 gender discrimination cases.
The project's work ranged widely. Ginsburg argued landmark cases such as Frontiero v. Richardson and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, which helped establish that laws classifying people by sex must face heightened scrutiny. After the Supreme Court refused in 1976 to treat pregnancy discrimination as sex discrimination, Ginsburg and staff attorney Susan Deller Ross campaigned for a legislative fix, and Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. The project also challenged rules that kept women off navy ships and out of police forces.
Ginsburg stayed closely involved until she became a federal judge in 1980. Antonin Scalia later called her the leading litigator for women's rights, the Thurgood Marshall of that cause. The project carried on after her, winning cases that required employer pension and insurance plans to treat women and men equally, and it remains part of the ACLU's work today.
Why it matters
The Women's Rights Project helped dismantle laws that treated men and women differently, reshaping American law on equality.
About Ruth Bader Ginsburg
U.S. Supreme Court Justice; pioneer of gender equality jurisprudence; co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project.
More about Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Ginsburg co-founded the first US women's rights law journalIn 1970 Ruth Bader Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter at Rutgers, the first law journal in the United States to focus exclusively on women's rights.
- Ginsburg was Columbia Law School's first tenured womanIn 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman granted tenure at Columbia Law School, where she co-wrote the first law school casebook on sex discrimination.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg won five of six cases for equalityLong before joining the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued six sex discrimination cases before it in the 1970s and won five.
- Ginsburg's Ledbetter dissent inspired the Fair Pay ActRuth Bader Ginsburg's 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear called on Congress to act. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became law in 2009, and she was credited with inspiring it.
- Ginsburg's Olmstead ruling advanced disability rightsIn Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the ADA covers mental illness and that needlessly confining people with disabilities in institutions is discrimination.
- Ginsburg's Reed v. Reed brief won equal protection for womenRuth Bader Ginsburg wrote the brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), the first case in which the Supreme Court extended the Constitution's equal protection guarantee to women.
- Ginsburg won equal pay for women teachers at RutgersAt Rutgers Law School, Ruth Bader Ginsburg discovered she was paid less than male colleagues. She joined an equal pay campaign that won substantial raises for the women.
- Ginsburg's VMI opinion opened a military college to womenIn United States v. Virginia (1996), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion striking down the Virginia Military Institute's male-only admissions policy.
Sources
- Tribute: The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and WRP Staff American Civil Liberties Union
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wikipedia
- Reed v. Reed Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.