Content area
Full Text
In an issue devoted to diversity, the Waymaker series proudly includes an interview with the person in this country who deserves the most credit for exploding the stereotypes that have inhibited diversity-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite her extraordinary records at Harvard and Columbia and graduating first in her class at Cokimbia, hw firms inl· tially showed little interest in Ms. Ginsburg. Eventually she joined the Rutgers hw faculty and developed and taught one of the first seminars in the country on women and the law. She attracted the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the historic collaboration began.
The ACLU invited Professor Ginsburg to serve as an advocate for SaUy Reed, an Idaho woman who had sought to administer her deceased son's estate. Ms. Reed was prevented from doing so when a court appointed her husband under a state statute expticidy granting preference to males over equally qualified females. Outraged about this discrimination, Professor Ginsburg wrote the brief for her case, and in Reed v. Reed1 the United States Supreme Court, for the first urne, found that the statute discriminated on the basis of gender and viohted a woman's right to equal protection. The brief in Reed v. Reed became known as the "grandmother brief because it formed the intellectual basis for aü the arguments on gender discrimination that followed.
Co-founding the Women's Rights Project of the ACLU, Professor Ginsburg joined the hw faculty at CoL·mbia where she taught courses on procedure, gender, and the Constitution. Outside the classroom, she developed the strategy, wrote the briefs, and argued before the Supreme Court the country's most important gender discrimination cases. The Supreme Court yielded to her careful strategy and brilliant arguments and decided at last, in 1976 in Craig v. Boren,2 that to withstand a constitutional challenge, discrimination on the basis of gender deserved more scrutiny than the court had previously given it - at hast an intermediate level of scrutiny.
Professor Ginsburg left her position at Columbia in 1 980 when President Carter nomi' nated her for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She served with distinction on that court until President Clinton nominated her to be an Associate Justice of...