THE ADVOCATE Newsletter of The Baltimore County Bar Association VOLUME XXX, NO. 2
September/October 2020
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE By Jay D. Miller NOTORIOUS RBG-MAY HER MEMORY BE A BLESSING Our profession lost a legal giant. I feel it is my absolute obligation to all BCBA women to dedicate this President’s message to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who began shattering ceilings and crashing barriers well before her Supreme Court nomination. She was the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, for which she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court. She won five of those cases, including a gender equality case that ruled a state law favored women over men because it gave benefits to widows but not to widowers. She was instrumental in advancing reproductive rights, gender equality, healthcare access, and same-sex marriage. Not only was she among a handful of women attending law school at the time, she graduated first in her class at Columbia University in 1959, while taking care of her daughter, attending her husband’s classes, taking notes and helping him pass as he battled cancer. She was as well known for her dissents as for her majority opinions. Justice Ginsburg said about her dissents: “Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say my colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way but the greatest dissents do become court opinions”.
ruling is out of tune with the realities of wage discrimination” and a “cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose.” Her greatest quote from Ledbetter however, is the following: “In our view, the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” a simply brilliant sentence that sums up the years of frustration suffered by millions of women who felt helpless to change a rigged system of pay. But this quote sums it up best: “I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.”
This warrior’s greatest quote has to be this: “I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court and I say when there are nine”. Or “a persons’ birth status should not enter into the Her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear ultimately way that person is treated.” Those quotes summarize inspired passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay who she was, an advocate for the less fortunate, the mistreated, the downtrodden and the minority. Act. Justice Ginsburg stated that the “majority’s Continued on page 2
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September/October 2020