Ariane de Vogue of ABC News has this blog post that shows just how different the world is today with respect to gender equality. The article recounts Justice Ginsburg’s recent talk about a court decision stemming from a state law that favored men over women.  The law existed in 1971 at a time when Ginsburg was working as a young lawyer and law professor with an expertise in gender discrimination.  It was an Idaho probate law that read “males must be preferred to females” when more than one person was equally qualified to administer an estate.  Long before she took the bench as a Supreme Court Justice, Ginsburg challenged the law and won the decision.

In the case Reed v. Reed, the Supreme Court, for the first time in history, applied the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to strike down a law that discriminated against women. Ginsburg told an audience gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the decision that the case was a turning point that led to a series of other cases striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.  In a unanimous decision, the Court held that the law’s dissimilar treatment of men and women was unconstitutional.  Chief Justice Burger’s opinion said in part:

To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and whatever may be said as to the positive values of avoiding intra-family controversy, the choice in this context may not lawfully be mandated solely on the basis of sex.