- Person
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Lived
- 1933–2020
- Field
- Constitutional Law
- From
- American
The story
The Virginia Military Institute, a public college known for its demanding military training and distinctive educational methods, admitted only men. By the 1990s it was the last all-male public university in the United States. The United States government challenged the policy as unconstitutional sex discrimination, and after years in the lower courts the case reached the Supreme Court.
Virginia's answer was to propose a separate programme for women, the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership, at Mary Baldwin College, a private women's college. The question for the Court was whether that was enough.
On 26 June 1996 the Court ruled 7 to 1 against Virginia, with Justice Clarence Thomas taking no part because his son was a VMI student. Justice John Paul Stevens had first asked Sandra Day O'Connor to write the opinion, but she declined, saying that it should be Ruth's. Ginsburg held that the state had failed to show an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for excluding women, as the Equal Protection Clause requires. She found that the women's programme would not offer the same rigorous training, facilities, faculty, funding, prestige or alumni network, and compared it to Texas's attempt decades earlier to keep its law school white by creating a separate school for Black students, which the Court had rejected in Sweatt v. Painter. The ruling struck at any law that denies women full citizenship and an equal chance to aspire, achieve and contribute to society.
Justice Antonin Scalia, her close friend, wrote the lone dissent and made sure she received it early so she could answer it; she later said it ruined her weekend but made her opinion much better. VMI briefly considered becoming a private college to escape the ruling, but its board voted 9 to 8 to admit women.
Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio called the opinion the jewel in the crown of Ginsburg's majority opinions, and the Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck called it perhaps the best-known and most important majority opinion she wrote. In 2018 Ginsburg told VMI cadets that she had known her opinion would make VMI a better place. The decision strengthened protection against sex discrimination by public institutions across the country.
Why it matters
The VMI decision strengthened legal protection against sex discrimination by public institutions across the United States.
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 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.
Sources
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wikipedia
- United States v. Virginia Wikipedia
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