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To today’s youth, judgeship as an aspiration for a girl is not at all outlandish. Contrast the ancient days (the fall of 1956) when I entered law school. Women were less than 3 percent of the legal profession in the United States, and only one woman had ever served on a federal appellate court.I Today about half the nation’s law students and more than one-third of our federal judges are women, including three of the nine Justices seated on the U.S. Supreme Court bench. Women hold more than 30 percent of U.S. law school deanships and serve as general counsel to 24 percent of Fortune 500
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“In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.”
When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.
Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.
For both men and women the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show. . . . As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.XII I heartily concur in that expectation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“Such is the character of human language, that no word conveys to the mind, in all situations, one single definite idea. . . .”
“I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don’t want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.”
The debate involved in the case persists to some extent to this very day: are protective labor laws applicable to women only permissible, or does the equal protection provision in our Constitution require that labor laws protect male and female workers alike?
Every other year the women in the Senate and the women at the Court meet for dinner. The first time, in 1994, there were two Justices and six senators. In 2012, we were three, and seventeen women held Senate seats.
All of us appreciate that the institution we serve is far more important than the particular individuals who compose the Court’s bench at any given time. And our job, in my view, is the best work a jurist anywhere could have. Our charge is to pursue justice as best we can.
vägmärken, which translates literally as “pathmarker” or “waypaver.”
(Lockwood’s case illustrates the productive dialogue sometimes carried on between the Court and Congress. It shows, too, that Congress sometimes is more in tune with changing times than the Court is. Think of Lilly Ledbetter’s case. The Court, five to four, said Ledbetter sued too late. I dissented, saying the Court got it wrong, and Congress should fix it. Congress did, enacting the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in record time.)
Though she could not vote for president, she twice ran for the office herself, pointing out that nothing in the Constitution barred a woman’s candidacy.
“We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor equal respect until we command it.”
Even so, there is a need for women of Lockwood’s sense and steel to guard against backsliding, and to ensure that our daughters and granddaughters can aspire and achieve, with no artificial barriers blocking their way.
idée fixe, the unyielding conviction that women and lawyering, no less judging, do not mix.
It was only in 1869 that Iowa’s Arabella Mansfield became the first female to gain admission to the practice of law in this country. That same year, the St. Louis Law School became the first in the nation to open its doors to women.
Today, women account for roughly 19 percent of law school deans, 25 percent of tenured professors, and about 35 percent of law faculty members overall.
Another revealing difference. In the Harvard student study, women outnumbered men two to one in reporting that “helping others” was an important consideration in choosing law as a career.
Florence Allen, first woman ever to serve on an Article III federal court. Before joining the federal bench, Allen achieved many “firsts” in Ohio: first female assistant prosecutor in the country; first woman elected to sit on a court of general jurisdiction; and the nation’s first female state supreme court justice.
The case, Reed v. Reed, decided on November 22, 1971, stands today as an historical landmark: the first time in history that the Supreme Court invalidated a sex-based statute under the Equal Protection Clause. (A few months after Reed, the Tenth Circuit similarly struck down the dependent-care gender classification in the tax law, giving Charles Moritz his tax deduction.)
