![]() ![]() Several of them thanked the justice for helping them to achieve their dreams, and I found that quite moving."Īs the Supreme Court grew more conservative, Justice Ginsburg found herself more frequently in dissent. "They were incredibly excited about their lives going forward and determined to make a difference in the world. Years later, Frelinghuysen accompanied Ginsburg to VMI, where they met some of the young women cadets. "It was obvious to her that Virginia was violating the Constitution, violating our notions of equality, by excluding women from this unique opportunity." "For her, I think this case was a slam dunk," says Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen, who worked on that VMI case as a law clerk for Justice Ginsburg from 1995-96. Several years later, she wrote the landmark decision that struck down the male-only admission policy at the Virginia Military Institute. Ginsburg's push for gender equality was cemented when she joined the Supreme Court herself in 1993. We just had to keep pressing, and we had to keep demanding, and we had to keep the flame lit." "She engendered all kinds of hope, all kinds of conviction that this was all going to happen. " set the stage, she set the tone, she set the expectation," Peratis says. Those were heady days, recalls her ACLU colleague Kathleen Peratis. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former justice Sandra Day O'Connor attend California first lady Maria Shriver's annual Women's Conference in 2010 at the Long Beach Convention Center. Giving Social Security survivor benefits to a widow but not a widower? She won that fight, too. So, a law excluding women from jury service? Ginsburg fought that before the Supreme Court, and won. "The theme that wove everything together," Tyler says, "was that no one is going to be free to achieve their full human potential if laws based on outdated stereotypes are allowed to stand on the books." "She, case by case, brought the all-male Supreme Court along by educating them about how laws predicated on gender stereotypes do not just hold women back they also hold men back," says UC Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler, who clerked for Justice Ginsburg from 1999-2000. There was another calculation, too: perhaps, Ginsburg reasoned, discrimination against male plaintiffs might rouse more sympathy among the nine male justices. " They had and have a unique impact on women, but they also had an impact on men." "She understood in a very broad way that stereotypes, gender stereotypes, really do hurt everybody," Peratis says. This was another key part of Ginsburg's strategy: she argued a number of cases on behalf of male plaintiffs. "She realized that there were just a lot of trees that were ripe for being chopped down," Peratis says, "and decided that the way to approach the overall problem was to show that men and women were harmed by what she called putting them in pigeonholes." She hid a pregnancy under baggy clothes so she wouldn't lose a teaching job.Īs a litigator, Peratis explains, Ginsburg took discriminatory laws and methodically eviscerated them, one by one. ![]() "She really knew how to create the story and sell the story."ĭeath Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg In RBG's Own Words: Listen To 5 NPR Interviews With The Liberal Icon "She was a great performer," says Kathleen Peratis, another ACLU colleague from the '70s. "She said, 'Don't you know that those nine men to whom you are arguing, when they hear that word, their first association is not what you want them to be thinking about?!'" "I owe it all to my secretary at Columbia Law School, who said 'I'm typing these briefs and articles for you and there's the word sex, sex, sex on every page!'" Ginsburg told the audience. One strategy Ginsburg adopted was to use the phrase "gender discrimination" in her arguments, not "sex discrimination."ĭecades later, on a panel honoring her at Columbia University, her law school alma mater, Ginsburg explained how she arrived at that linguistic choice: She persuaded the Court because she was just brilliant." ![]() "She was just a little, tiny, slight woman," Ross remembers, "but she was so incisive, she was so sharp. Under the influence of Ginsburg's persuasive arguments, that changed. "The Supreme Court, in 100 years of having an equal protection clause in our 14th Amendment, had never ruled that women have the same rights as men," Ross says. Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Anita Hill Reflects On Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Gender Equality Legacy ![]()
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