- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
Sally and Cecil Reed were a separated couple in Idaho whose son had died. Each asked the probate court in Ada County to be named administrator of his small estate, worth less than $1,000. Idaho law stated that when several people were equally entitled, males must be preferred to females, and the court appointed Cecil. Sally challenged the rule, and after a series of appeals her case reached the United States Supreme Court.
Sally Reed was represented at the Court by the Idaho lawyer Allen Derr. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a professor at Rutgers, volunteered to write the ACLU's brief, working with the ACLU legal director Mel Wulf. She listed Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon as authors even though they had not worked on it, a symbolic way of acknowledging the intellectual debt that feminist legal argument owed them. She also cited two German court decisions, an early sign of her interest in comparative law.
On 22 November 1971 the Court ruled unanimously for Sally Reed. It held that giving a mandatory preference to one sex simply to avoid hearings on the merits was exactly the kind of arbitrary choice the Equal Protection Clause forbids. For the first time, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection to strike down a law that treated women and men differently.
The ruling applied only the ordinary test of whether a law has a rational basis, and Ginsburg and her colleagues had hoped for more: a ruling that sex, like race, was a suspect classification. To pursue that goal the ACLU created its Women's Rights Project under her leadership in 1972. In the cases that followed, including Frontiero v. Richardson and Craig v. Boren, the Court moved to a tougher standard, known as intermediate scrutiny, for laws based on sex.
Reed's effects went well beyond one estate. Hundreds of laws were changed after the decision, and Congress went through the US Code revising almost every provision that openly classified people by sex. The case opened the door to decades of rulings against sex discrimination, and it was the first major step in the legal strategy that made Ginsburg the country's leading advocate for equal rights.
Why it matters
Reed v. Reed opened the door to decades of rulings striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.
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 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 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.