Neither their ascent nor their leadership was an accident. In the years following O’Connor’s retirement in 2006, when the conservative Court turned its back on women’s rights, Ginsburg, the eighty-something feminist, became the icon of resistance to the backlash. In 1993, Ginsburg joined her at the pinnacle of power. And she was the owner of a precious vote on every Supreme Court decision on women’s rights, starting with the crucial fifth vote in Hogan v. After O’Connor was selected for the Supreme Court in 1981, however, she became the most famous symbol of a lived feminist existence on the planet. During those years, Justice O’Connor advanced women’s equality in politics, although without embracing the women’s movement formally as Ginsburg had. Even after she became a federal judge in 1980, she continued to speak and write on women’s rights. From 1972 to 1980, she ran the preeminent women’s legal group, the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and she taught courses in women’s rights at Columbia. Ginsburg was a self-conscious legal movement leader. Only some ascend to positions of power, and only some who ascend lead the movement itself to success. When a moment is ripe for legal social change, there are often many lawyers who would like to lead it. The two rose to be leaders in the movement, at first Ginsburg directly and O’Connor by example. Then, in the heady days of the 1970s, anything seemed possible. Despite Paul’s half century of effort, the ERA had gone nowhere. Right after women won the vote in 1920, the most radical of the suffrage leaders, Alice Paul, proposed an Equal Rights Amendment for women as the only way to attack the whole web of discriminatory laws at once. The resurgent women’s movement even revived an old project from the 1920s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed in the wake of the racial social movement, also barred discrimination on the basis of sex, and women’s movement lawyers were starting to bring cases under it. When O’Connor and Ginsburg emerged from their private worlds of practice and teaching onto the public stage in the early 1970s, the women’s movement was actively moving to become the next legal social movement. They invoke the most unrepresentative institutions, the courts, often the life-tenured federal courts, and they are carried out by people, like both the women justices, of a rarefied mind-set and privileged social class. Unlike mass social movements, legal social change movements are heavily top-down. All succeeding legal movements to some extent emulated Marshall’s strategy of social change through legal revolution.īoth O’Connor and Ginsburg were part of the American elite-they went to Stanford and Harvard and Columbia Law Schools. When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the racial legal movement gained another arrow for its quiver.
In the 1940s and ’50s the lawyer (later Justice) Thurgood Marshall had led the most successful such initiative-using the Civil War amendments to enforce racial equality through the courts. As the preeminent commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it two centuries ago, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” Since the Civil War, most American social movements have relied on the potent equality-enforcing constitutional amendments passed in the wake of that engagement. Social revolution through law is a particularly American phenomenon. They chose to become lawyers when there was not even a whisper of a women’s legal movement, but their choice of career placed them perfectly to make a social revolution through the law when the opportunity arose. Ironically, toward the end of her life, she became an icon on that most populist of mediums, the Internet.
#Justice sandra day o connor merit scholarship professional#
When she spoke or wrote, it was almost always in a professional context-women judges, women lawyers, the bar association, law school events, essays in law reviews. She was nowhere to be seen in the legendary Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 or, indeed, marching for anything. Ginsburg, the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s movement, was not a conventional movement activist either. O’Connor’s only formal “feminist” affiliation was with the exceedingly mainstream Associations of Women Judges. They did not lead a social movement in the conventional sense, marching and sitting in. How did they do it? First, they were lawyers. This is an excerpt from the new book by Linda Hirshman, “Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.”
0 kommentar(er)
