4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In her fight for women’s rights, the then–ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg did something unexpected: She argued on behalf of men.
“It didn’t matter to her if the plaintiff was a man or a woman,” says the Georgetown law professor Wendy Williams. “Because in most of those cases, the discrimination against the man was derivative of a prior and worse discrimination against the woman.”
Craig v. Boren involved Oklahoma frat boys, a drive-through convenience store, and gender-specific beer laws. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1976 decision was foundational in advancing equal rights for women and represented a key moment in the future justice’s career.
This story originally ran on More Perfect, a Radiolab spin-off about the Supreme Court.
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0:00.0 | I'm Julia Longoria, this is the experiment. |
0:03.8 | And this week, we're going to revisit a story I reported a little while back for a different |
0:09.0 | show called More Perfect. |
0:11.4 | It's hosted by Jad Abumrod from Radio Lab, and it's all about the Supreme Court. |
0:17.0 | But really, it's about the same things we explore on the experiment. |
0:21.1 | The ideals of our country that we strive for, and the messy imperfect pursuit of those |
0:28.2 | ideals. |
0:30.2 | This is a story about a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg. |
0:33.9 | Before she got on the Supreme Court, she was a lawyer, trying to convince an all-male |
0:39.6 | Supreme Court to make gender equality a reality. |
0:45.5 | The Honourable, the Chief Justice and the Associate Justice is of the Supreme Court of the |
0:50.4 | United States. |
0:52.4 | Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. |
1:04.5 | Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. |
1:22.4 | Here we are. |
1:39.0 | I'm going to ask you an utterly false question, which is where would you like to start? |
1:43.4 | As if we hadn't been doing this for so damn long. |
1:47.8 | Okay, so let me outline the basic dilemma that's at the heart of the story here. |
1:55.0 | And I'm going to put it to you as a question. |
1:58.1 | If you were to do a control F in the Constitution, like how many times do you think the word sex |
2:03.4 | comes up? |
2:04.4 | Oh, that's interesting. |
... |
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