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Profs and Pints DC presents: “RBG before she was ‘Notorious,” a look at the early Ruth Bader Ginsburg and how she got women into the U.S. Constitution, with Philippa Strum, former director of U.S. Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, longtime interviewer of Justice Ginsburg, and author of several award-winning books on the U.S. Supreme Court, constitutional law, and women and politics.
When Nancy Pelosi decided that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, it wasn’t because of Ginsburg’s years as a judge and justice. Justice Ginsburg was a good jurist, but so were many others.
What put Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the path to becoming a popular icon was the gender equality cases that she, as a young attorney, took to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s. There, her challenge was to give the all-male justices what she described as the equivalent of a grade-school education about the many ways in which American women were discriminated against and why such discrimination was unconstitutional.
Learn how she did it in this fascinating talk by Professor Philippa Strum, a longtime scholar and teacher of political science and constitutional law and the author of On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law. Having interviewed Justice Ginsburg over the course of more than three decades and been a faculty member or guest lecturer on law and civil liberties at universities around the world, Dr. Strum will paint a distinctly informed portrait of the groundbreaking lawyer early in her career.
The talk will examine why the Supreme Court allowed women to be discriminated against until Ruth Bader Ginsburg began litigating, and what Ginsburg said and did to make a difference. Among the questions Professor Strum will tackle: What was unique about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s arguments before the Supreme Court? Why didn’t she take reproductive rights cases to that tribunal? And what led her to take cases in which men claimed they had been discriminated against?
It’s a talk that will leave you with a greater appreciation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a deeper understanding of how change comes about through the courts. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Ruth Bader Ginsburg upon her 1959 graduation from Columbia Law School (Columbia University photo).
