- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
Ruth Bader Ginsburg found it hard to get legal work after graduating at the top of her class at Columbia in 1959. No law firm would take her, and a Supreme Court justice refused to hire her as a clerk because she was a woman. After a clerkship with a federal judge and two years on a Columbia research project, she took her first post as a professor at Rutgers Law School in 1963. She was one of fewer than twenty women law professors in the United States, and she taught mainly civil procedure.
She soon learned that she was being paid less than her male colleagues. The reason she was given was that her husband had a very good job. That was the year Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
Ginsburg did not accept it. She joined an equal pay campaign with other women teaching at the university. According to the ACLU, the campaign resulted in substantial increases for all the women who had complained. She went on to earn tenure at Rutgers in 1969.
The experience shaped her career. Prompted by what she had faced, she began handling sex discrimination complaints referred by the New Jersey affiliate of the ACLU. In 1970 she became faculty adviser to the new Women's Rights Law Reporter, in 1971 she wrote the winning brief in Reed v. Reed, and in 1972 she co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project. Equal pay remained one of its causes: in a later case, the project's lawyers first set out the influential theory of comparable worth, arguing that jobs of equal value to an employer deserve equal pay.
Decades later, as a Supreme Court justice, she returned to the issue in her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, warning that pay gaps often stay hidden and grow over time. Her call for Congress to act led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The small campaign at Rutgers was an early sign of a lifelong conviction that women should be paid and treated on the same terms as men.
Why it matters
The Rutgers campaign showed that collective action could correct pay discrimination and launched Ginsburg's work for equality under the law.
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'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'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
- Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. 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.