The Ginsburg Tapes

I join forces with Kate Shaw and Melissa Murray, co-hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, for a deep dive into the Equal Rights Amendment. Questions for Lauren? Shoot her an email at [email protected], or find her on Twitter @laurenmoxley.

Episode 7: After Leon Goldfarb’s wife, Hannah Goldfarb, passed away, he was denied benefits available to sole surviving spouses that he would have obtained if their gender-roles were reversed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Leon in challenging the law. The government argued that Ginsburg wanted to “characterize this as a women’s rights case because the cause of...

Episode 6: When did the Supreme Court finally raise the bar for sex equality under the Constitution?  In a case about beer. In Oklahoma, women could buy 3.2% alcohol beer at 18, but men had to wait until they turned 21.  Two fraternity brothers at Oklahoma State University teamed up with a co-owner of a...

This short episode describes the motivation for the Ginsburg Tapes podcast, and mashes up key moments from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court in the 1970s. Questions for Lauren? Shoot her an email at [email protected], or find her on Twitter and Instagram @ginsburgtapes.

Episode 5: After Stephen Wiesenfeld’s wife Paula died giving birth to their son, he was denied benefits available to sole surviving mothers with modest incomes. Had Stephen and Paula’s places been reversed, Paula would have received those benefits. Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Stephen in challenging the social security law. She used the case to show...

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...