![]() ![]() " set the stage, she set the tone, she set the expectation," Peratis says. Those were heady days, recalls her ACLU colleague Kathleen Peratis. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former justice Sandra Day O'Connor attend California first lady Maria Shriver's annual Women's Conference in 2010 at the Long Beach Convention Center. In all, she argued six discrimination cases before the Court, and won five. Giving Social Security survivor benefits to a widow but not a widower? She won that fight, too. So, a law excluding women from jury service? Ginsburg fought that before the Supreme Court, and won. "The theme that wove everything together," Tyler says, "was that no one is going to be free to achieve their full human potential if laws based on outdated stereotypes are allowed to stand on the books." ![]() ![]() "She, case by case, brought the all-male Supreme Court along by educating them about how laws predicated on gender stereotypes do not just hold women back they also hold men back," says UC Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler, who clerked for Justice Ginsburg from 1999-2000. There was another calculation, too: perhaps, Ginsburg reasoned, discrimination against male plaintiffs might rouse more sympathy among the nine male justices. " They had and have a unique impact on women, but they also had an impact on men." "She understood in a very broad way that stereotypes, gender stereotypes, really do hurt everybody," Peratis says. ![]()
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