- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
In 1970 there was no American law journal devoted to the rights of women. Scholarship on sex discrimination was scattered and rarely taken seriously by the legal establishment. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been teaching at Rutgers Law School since 1963, when she was one of fewer than twenty women law professors in the whole country.
Her outlook had been shaped by Sweden. From 1961 to 1963 she worked on Columbia Law School's Project on International Procedure, learned Swedish and co-wrote a book on Swedish civil procedure with the jurist Anders Bruzelius, doing much of her research at Lund University. She was struck by what she saw: women made up 20 to 25 percent of law students there, and one judge she observed was eight months pregnant and still at work. Bruzelius's daughter Karin later said that Ginsburg came to see that women could have a very different way of life and legal position from the one they had in the United States. Lund gave her an honorary degree in 1969.
The Women's Rights Law Reporter began as a student initiative. A recent graduate, Anne Marie Boylan, produced a first issue from her Newark apartment in 1970, but it folded for lack of money. That autumn the law student Elizabeth Langer gathered fellow students to relaunch it at Rutgers. The dean told them they needed a faculty adviser, office space and funding, and Ginsburg agreed to become the adviser. Small grants came from groups including the Barnard College Women's Center, and the founding advisory board included Ginsburg, Pauli Murray and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
It became the first law journal in the United States to focus exclusively on women's rights. When Ginsburg left Rutgers in 1972, Professor Nadine Taub took over as adviser, and in 1974 the journal became formally associated with the law school. It is still published quarterly by an independent student group at Rutgers Law School in Newark.
The journal arrived at the moment Ginsburg was turning her ideas into action. Within two years she wrote the brief in Reed v. Reed, co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project and, at Columbia, co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination. A dedicated journal gave the arguments behind those cases a home, and helped make women's rights a serious field of legal scholarship.
Why it matters
The journal helped establish women's rights as a serious field of legal scholarship.
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 ACLU Women's Rights ProjectIn 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined more than 300 sex discrimination cases by 1974.
- 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
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wikipedia
- Women's Rights Law Reporter Wikipedia
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