Civil rights, jurisprudence, advocacy, the work of expanding rights and protections.
French jurist René Cassin was a principal drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, later presided over the European Court of Human Rights and won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize.
Read the full story →In 1924 Richard Willstätter gave up one of Germany's most prestigious chairs of chemistry in protest after his Munich colleagues refused to appoint a scientist because he was Jewish.
Read the full story →At the 1977 Nobel festivities, Rosalyn Yalow said the world cannot afford to lose the talents of half its people if it is to solve its many problems.
Read the full story →“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too,” Rose Schneiderman declared in 1912; she spent half a century winning better wages, hours and safety for working women.
Read the full story →In 1903 Rose Schneiderman organised the women in her cap factory so quickly that the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union chartered its first women's local within days.
Read the full story →Rose Schneiderman was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, bringing a labour organiser's experience to the defence of free speech and civil liberties.
Read the full story →Rose Schneiderman was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women in 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the new International Labour Organization.
Read the full story →At a memorial meeting on 2 April 1911, after the Triangle fire killed 146 garment workers, Rose Schneiderman declared that working people must save themselves through a strong movement.
Read the full story →In 1908 Rose Schneiderman turned down a scholarship to finish her schooling, saying she could not accept a privilege so few working women had, and organised workers instead.
Read the full story →In 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.
Read the full story →In 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.
Read the full story →In 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.
Read the full story →Long before joining the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued six sex discrimination cases before it in the 1970s and won five.
Read the full story →Ruth 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.
Read the full story →In 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.
Read the full story →Ruth 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.
Read the full story →At 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.
Read the full story →In United States v. Virginia (1996), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion striking down the Virginia Military Institute's male-only admissions policy.
Read the full story →Although he strongly supported the First World War, Samuel Gompers later backed amnesty for people imprisoned under wartime emergency laws for their opinions.
Read the full story →During the 1893 depression, Samuel Gompers addressed 25,000 unemployed workers in Chicago and argued that cutting wages hurt not only workers but the whole economy.
Read the full story →Samuel Gompers built the AFL around collective bargaining for higher wages, shorter hours and safe working conditions, procedures between labour and management still used today.
Read the full story →Samuel Gompers helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it as president, except for one year, until his death in 1924.
Read the full story →In the 1890s and 1900s Samuel Gompers helped Canada's Trades and Labour Congress with money and organisers as part of his vision for an international federation of labour.
Read the full story →At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Samuel Gompers chaired the Commission on International Labour Legislation, whose workers' rights charter was written into the Treaty of Versailles.
Read the full story →After the cigar makers' union nearly collapsed in the 1870s, Samuel Gompers rebuilt it with sickness, accident, unemployment and death benefits that other unions copied.
Read the full story →Threatened with death in Decatur, Alabama, and guarded by the National Guard, Samuel Leibowitz vowed to defend the Scottsboro Boys "until hell freezes over".
Read the full story →In the Scottsboro trials, Samuel Leibowitz asked the prosecution to address a Black witness as "Mr. Sandford" rather than by his first name, defying courtroom custom in Alabama.
Read the full story →Elected a Brooklyn judge in 1940, Samuel Leibowitz served nearly three decades on the bench, hearing gang and organised crime cases and rooting out corrupt officials.
Read the full story →In 1937 Samuel Leibowitz defended Robert Irwin, a former mental patient accused of triple murder, and negotiated a plea that spared him the death penalty.
Read the full story →Samuel Leibowitz defended the Scottsboro Boys without a fee and won Norris v. Alabama, the 1935 ruling that Alabama's exclusion of Black jurors was unconstitutional.
Read the full story →Samuel Leibowitz, who did not share the politics of the group that hired him, took the Scottsboro case to defend "the basic rights of man" after reading the trial record.
Read the full story →Sidney Hillman oversaw and helped fund the CIO drive that created the Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, in 1939.
Read the full story →In 1935 Sidney Hillman joined John L. Lewis in founding the Committee for Industrial Organization to unionise mass-production workers ignored by craft unions.
Read the full story →In 1914 Sidney Hillman became the first president of the new Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, saying "The tailors made me. They can have me."
Read the full story →Sidney Hillman gave key help to Senator Robert Wagner in drafting the National Labor Relations Act and to Frances Perkins in winning the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Read the full story →When a few women walked out of a Chicago clothing factory in 1910, the strike grew to some 45,000 garment workers, and the young cutter Sidney Hillman emerged as a leader.
Read the full story →In the 1920s Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated pioneered "social unionism", offering members unemployment insurance and cooperative housing and founding the Amalgamated Bank.
Read the full story →After surviving a four-month lockout in 1919, Sidney Hillman's union had contracts with 85 percent of New York's men's clothing makers by 1920 and a 44-hour working week.
Read the full story →In November 1974 France’s health minister, Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor, steered through the law that let French women obtain abortions legally and safely from 1975.
Read the full story →As one of three UN truth commissioners, the Auschwitz survivor Thomas Buergenthal helped document the killings of El Salvador's civil war and recommend how the country should face them.
Read the full story →A founding judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Thomas Buergenthal sat on the 1988 case that made states legally responsible for investigating and remedying forced disappearances.
Read the full story →In 1893 Tobias Asser convened the first Hague Conference on Private International Law, the start of an organisation whose conventions today return abducted children, safeguard international adoptions and let documents be recognised in 130 countries.
Read the full story →Vera Rubin campaigned for decades to open astronomy to women, saying it was well known that she was available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”