Jill Norgren Reviews On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law; Lady Justice, Women the Law and the Battle to Save America; Justice on the Brink and
On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law. By Philippa Strum, University Press of Kansas, 2022. Available in paperback and ebook
Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America. By Dahlia Lithwick, Penguin
Press, 2022. Available in hard cover, ebook, and audiobook.
Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court. By Linda Greenhouse, Random House,
2021. Available in hard cover, paper, ebook, and audiobook.
Make a New Year’s resolution to read these books, and to read them as a group, three short,
complementary volumes concerned with civil rights, women lawyers, and the Supreme Court.
Authored by well-known authorities, they provide powerful primers on how rights have been won, and lost, what is likely to occur in the coming years, and what role activists might play in determining whether that future is bleak or bright.
Begin with On Account of Sex. Author Philippa Strum is a political scientist and legal historian who counts among her dozen well-regarded, highly readable studies When the Nazis Came to Skokie, Women in the Barracks, and Brandeis: Justice for the People. In a recent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center Strum disclosed that she had written On Account of Sex because the public had scant knowledge of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s extraordinary pre-court legal career.
She told her audience RBG had been a good judge. However, she continued, it was Ginsburg’s 1970s litigation for gender equality that made her special, the author of path breaking work comparable to that of legal giants Louis D. Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall before they joined the Supreme Court. On Account of Sex is Strum’s very successful effort to demonstrate the ways Ginsburg did notorious work long before she became the 'notorious RBG'.
In 1978, addressing an audience at West Virginia University, attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained that “the Constitution was viewed by jurists until well past this century’s midpoint as a virtually empty cupboard for sex equality claims.” Strum’s book tells the story of how Ginsburg filled that cupboard, working with a small group of women students and lawyers, to change the face of constitutional law in our country.
Professor Ruth Ginsburg turned to the question of women and the law in 1969 after Rutgers law students asked her for a course on the topic. RBG’s review of the case law revealed that there was very little, and what there was did little for women with respect to employment, civic rights, or domestic responsibilities. Ginsburg began thinking about how she might use her legal training to bring change.
As Strum describes her, Ginsburg was a cautious, thoughtful strategist. With her tax lawyer husband, she brought her first sex discrimination case in 1970 to the federal Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. It was titled Mortiz v. Commissioner. And they won. It was significant that the appeal involved a man claiming sex discrimination on the part of the IRS. From the start, RBG believed that gender stereotypes embodied in law hurt both sexes.
Next, Ginsburg brought the all-male Supreme Court the case of Reed v. Reed which asserted a mother’s right to administer a deceased child’s estate. It was the first of a half a dozen cases in which she convinced that court to establish a constitutional right to gender equality. After oral argument in Reed, Justice Harry Blackmun made a note to himself, “I am inclined to feel that sex can be considered a suspect classification… There can be no question that women have been held down in the past in almost every area.” (p.53)
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