Ruth Bader Ginsburg Argues Her First Case Before Supreme Court
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, representing the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, on this day argued her first case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Twenty years later, she became a Justice on the Supreme Court. Only one other person in American history accomplished the same feat. Thurgood Marshall argued won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954, in which the Court declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional. Thirteen years later, President Lyndon Johnson appoi♦nted him to the Court.
Ginsburg on this day argued Frontiero v. Richardson, in which Sharron Frontiero, a Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, applied for housing benefits for her husband, who was not in the U.S. military. Under prevailing policy, as a woman she was not entitled to that benefit. The Supreme Court held the policy unconstitutional as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
The decision in Frontiero v Richardson was a major breakthrough for constitutional protection for women’s equality. The Supreme Court had held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed women equal protection of the law in Reed v. Reed in 1971. Ginsburg wrote the brief in Reed but did not argue the case before the Supreme Court. Frontiero was a step forward, as the Court added that “classifications based on sex, like classifications based on race, alienage, or national origin, are inherently suspect, and must therefore be subjected to strict judicial scrutiny.” The “strict scrutiny” standard gave sex discrimination cases a higher standard of constitutional protection.
As head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, modeled her litigation program after Thurgood Marshall’s program that lead to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. Marshall’s strategy involved not immediately challenging segregated public schools because he believed that neither the Supreme Court nor the public was ready for dramatic change. Instead, he challenged smaller segregation issues such as segregation in state law schools, for the purpose of building a body of case law that would later support a challenge to segregated public schools. As we know, the strategy worked. And it worked for Ginsburg in the area of women’s rights.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, while still a member of the Supreme Court.
Read the great biography of RBG: Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (2018)
See the movie on Ginsburg: RBG (2018)
Don’t miss: Linda Hirshman, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (2015)
Learn more about the ACLU and the history of women’s rights: https://www.aclu.org/womens-rights/aclu-history-protecting-womens-equality
Watch an interview with Ginsburg:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTKaTjFlfzs