A Message from the President Kimberly K. Moore
Shattering the Glass Ceiling
Greetings! I hope the New Year is off to great start for you. For those of you with New Year’s Resolutions, remember one day at a time. We are often our own worst enemy when it comes to setbacks so don’t get discouraged. Look to friends, family and colleagues to encourage and keep you motivated. Last issue we focused on professionalism. This issue is devoted to Women in the Law. I thought it apropos to devote my article to three women I admire. It’s no secret that women have traditionally faced more barriers to entry in their attempts to enter the legal profession. But as the old saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way – and after jumping through countless hoops and skirting impossible legal boundaries, these women managed to shatter the stereotypes and reshape American law as we know it. Their enduring legacy says it all.
Equal Protection Clause. In Reed v Reed (1971), a minor, Richard Lynn Reed, died and his mother wanted to be designated as administrator of his estate. Sally and her husband, Cecil Reed, had separated prior to the child’s death. Despite Sally filing a petition first, Cecil’s application was automatically approved because of an Idaho statute that stated that “males must be preferred to females” when there was more than one qualified person available to administer someone’s estate. Relying on the 14th Amendment, Ginsberg argued that this violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed and struck down the Idaho statute. It was the first time the Court had ever applied the Equal Protection Clause to a law that discriminated on the basis of gender.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg
Ginsberg later argued that gender-based discrimination hurts men too in Frontiero v Richardson (1973). In an amicus brief, Ginsburg used the statute to argue against gender-based discrimination applied to men. She asked the Court during oral arguments “Why, did the framers of the 14th Amendment regard racial [discrimination] as odious? Because a person’s skin color bears no necessary relationship to ability. Similarly...a person’s sex bears no necessary relationship to ability.”
Few names in law are as influential as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The second woman to ever sit on the United States Supreme Court. This peerless trailblazer scored major victories for women on hotly contested issues. Prior to being appointed to the US Supreme Court, many of her cases hinged on the Fourteenth Amendment’s
A plurality of the Supreme Court found the benefit policy violated the Constitution and argued that, because of the United States’ long history of genderbased discrimination, the court should use a strict standard of judicial scrutiny for laws that used sex as a classification.
2 Tulsa Lawyer
