12 That heralded the beginning of the Women’s Rights Project that I was asked in late 1971 to direct with then-Professor Ginsburg. The Supreme Court agreed unanimously and, for the first time in history, ruled on behalf of a woman in a sex discrimination case.

Supreme Court, Ruth made the argument that there must be a substantial relationship between the discriminatory classification and a legitimate state interest. 10 Taking over the writing of the brief, now on appeal to the U.S. Idaho mandated a preference for males in the administration of estates. She wanted to be the administrator of her son’s estate but so did the father from whom she was divorced. In early 1971, the ACLU agreed to collaborate on a case brought by a mother, Sally Reed, whose teenage son had died. Commission on Civil Rights a report on statutes that would need to change to eliminate sex discrimination in our federal code. Supreme Court denied cert, 8 and Ruth would go on to weaponize that list a few years later when she and I presented to the U.S. 7 But the federal government and its lawyer, Erwin Griswold, the Solicitor General and former unwelcoming-to-women Dean of Harvard Law School, in petitioning for certiorari, supplied a list of all the federal statutes that would have to be changed if Mr. 5 The Tax Court had said that type of deduction was available only “to a woman, a widower or divorcé, or a husband whose wife is incapacitated or institutionalized.” 6 Working with the ACLU, Ruth began her soon-to-become legendary assault on sex stereotyping by appealing to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1970, while some of us were joining the call of the women’s liberation movement to march in protest of outrageous sex discrimination, Ruth and her husband Marty, a tax lawyer, decided to represent Charles Moritz, who lived alone with his elderly mother and had tried to obtain a tax deduction for wages paid to her caregiver. 2 In the mid-twentieth century, the Court approved “beneficial” practices by states making women’s service on juries optional 3 and approved Michigan’s law preventing women from working in bars unless a male relative was present when they were working. In the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court ruled that women had neither the right to practice law 1 nor the right to vote. Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed all our lives by profoundly influencing the law that had encouraged sex discrimination in the United States for centuries.

In my words ruth bader ginsburg