Feminist Hero

I just heard that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was operated on to remove a small cancerous tumor in her pancreas. This is very worrisome since she has already survived one round of cancer and this is number two. I am hopeful though that she will come through this second battle and return to her place on the USSC bench.

I’ve revered Justice Ginsburg since I was in law school and read three of her cases. I was active in the women’s movement at the time and had a great interest in the decisions that led the Court nearer to recognizing the equal rights of women. In the landmark case Craig v. Boren the Supreme Court held that gender discrimination cases should be decided by applying a heightened level of scrutiny. These cases still didn’t receive the same standard of review used to decide cases involving race or religion but none the less, Craig v Boren was a giant step toward securing equal opportunity under the law for women.

What I really admired was the measured approach taken by Ms. Ginsburg. She adopted the same strategy of patience used by Justice Thurgood Marshall when he and his NAACP colleagues fought the battle to end racial segregation. They picked their cases very carefully, prepared methodically and built one case upon another. Ginsburg did not use a head on aggressive approach instead she cleverly achieved her ultimate goal of improving the lot of women by upholding the rights of men. In the most well known case, Craig v. Boren, she fought for the rights of 18 year old males in Oklahoma to buy 3.2 beer just as the 18 year old females could. She probably could have cared less about teenage boys drinking near beer but she saw the opportunity to show that males were treated differently than females. By showing that gender discrimination wasn’t justified against males the next step would be showing that such discrimination wasn’t justified against females. The same approach was taken in Frontiero v. Richardson which secured military benefits for male dependents of female officers. In another case, she argued that a man was entitled to the Social Security benefits of his deceased spouse just as a woman was entitled to widow’s benefits. To the observer, it looked like Ms. Ginsburg was winning wars for the men of America but underneath she was laying the foundation for securing legal equality for women. Without her groundbreaking work, who knows how long it would have taken to get as far as we have today. As a law student I found her strategy delicious and I still relish it today.

Another fact I always found interesting was that like Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not get a job after graduating from law school even though she was at the top of her class (O’Connor was third). With such life experiences I always felt pretty confident of getting a fair hearing on gender based cases from both women.

Speedy recovery, your honor.