The Ginsburg Tapes

Edwards v. Healy involved a challenge to a Louisiana law that excused women from the duty to serve on juries. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s third oral argument before the Supreme Court, she tried to get the Court to overturn a ruling of just 13 years earlier upholding a volunteers-only jury scheme for women–which the Court...

At the same time that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was arguing the sex equality cases that we’re focusing on in this podcast, the Supreme Court also heard a number of pregnancy discrimination cases.  In each case, the Burger Court struggled to see how pregnancy discrimination is a function of sex.  In their minds, pregnancy is different. ...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg only lost one case as an oral advocate in the Supreme Court: Kahn v. Shevin. The case involved a challenge to a Florida law according a special tax exemption to female widows, but not male widowers. Every widow got the tax exemption, regardless of her income–even the wealthy widowed woman of Palm...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg made her debut as an oral advocate in the Supreme Court in Frontiero v. Richardson. The case involved a challenge to a law that treated men and women serving in the military differently. Specifically, Air Force Lieutenant Sharron Frontiero was denied dependent’s benefits for her husband, a navy veteran who had gone...

This is a preview of the Ginsburg Tapes, a podcast about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court—before she became #NotoriousRBG. Specifically, from 1972-1978, Ginsburg argued six cases in the Supreme Court.  In each case, she and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project brought constitutional challenges to laws treating men and women differently.  Ginsburg’s goal was...