Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been a stalwart supporter of women’s rights and LGBT rights. Her rulings on cases concerning women's rights and as LGBT rights have continued the impression Justice O’Connor gave in her decision in Roe v. Wade that gender may indeed matter in rulings with this trend most likely going to continue with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. She is considered as one the 100 Most Powerful Women and has spent time advocating for women's rights in the duration of her career. The question being is asked is “Does the gender of the Justices affect the ruling?” Women comprise one half, 50% of all human beings and American citizen so it begs the question whether men and women think different ways when it comes to judicial rulings
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The prospect of growing gender equality engulfed the nation. Women were finally gaining more and more positions of power and although Sandra Day O’Connor to crack the glass ceiling, it took Ruth Bader Ginsburg to shatter it. Although it was a move in the right direction, Hannah Brenner remarks in Rethinking Gender Equality in the Legal Profession’s Pipeline to Power: A Study on Media Coverage of Supreme Court Nominees that “Three women now sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, and a fourth recently retired, suggesting the attainment of formal gender equality. Despite this appearance of progress, women remain significantly underrepresented in major leadership roles within the legal profession, where they face extensive gender bias and stereotyping. This gender bias and stereotyping is also leveraged against women who are featured in the media, illustrated vividly by coverage of the most recent Supreme Court nominations” (Brenner 2012). The reason for the lack of women in the legal profession seems abhorrently clear. Sexism is still present in all sectors of the workforce. Traditional …show more content…
She is quite deemed an “activist judge” which means that throughout her rulings, she attempts to create social change. In Ginsburg’s case, this means gender equality. This does not come without its difficulties as other Justices disagree with her interpretation of equality and what constitutes gender equality. As most of the Justices are men, it’s difficult to speculate whether they would rule or think differently if they were women. Not only do other Justices, prevent Justice Ginsburg from carrying out her viewpoints, the law and government do as well. Every society has a history of discriminating against women and therefore every society has, or in the recent past, used to have a patriarchal system of government that prevented women from being empowered by purposefully prohibiting them from taking on positions of power within the government. Martha Alberson Fineman remarks that “Contemporary American law, culture, and political theory restrain the concept of equality as a tool of social justice. Equality in conjunction with a strong emphasis on personal liberty operates as a mandate for curtailing state action, rather than an aspirational measure of the comparative wellbeing of individuals. As a check on state involvement, our cramped notion of equality limits the state’s ability to affirmatively address economic, political, social, and structural inequalities” (Fineman
The prospect of growing gender equality engulfed the nation. Women were finally gaining more and more positions of power and although Sandra Day O’Connor to crack the glass ceiling, it took Ruth Bader Ginsburg to shatter it. Although it was a move in the right direction, Hannah Brenner remarks in Rethinking Gender Equality in the Legal Profession’s Pipeline to Power: A Study on Media Coverage of Supreme Court Nominees that “Three women now sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, and a fourth recently retired, suggesting the attainment of formal gender equality. Despite this appearance of progress, women remain significantly underrepresented in major leadership roles within the legal profession, where they face extensive gender bias and stereotyping. This gender bias and stereotyping is also leveraged against women who are featured in the media, illustrated vividly by coverage of the most recent Supreme Court nominations” (Brenner 2012). The reason for the lack of women in the legal profession seems abhorrently clear. Sexism is still present in all sectors of the workforce. Traditional …show more content…
She is quite deemed an “activist judge” which means that throughout her rulings, she attempts to create social change. In Ginsburg’s case, this means gender equality. This does not come without its difficulties as other Justices disagree with her interpretation of equality and what constitutes gender equality. As most of the Justices are men, it’s difficult to speculate whether they would rule or think differently if they were women. Not only do other Justices, prevent Justice Ginsburg from carrying out her viewpoints, the law and government do as well. Every society has a history of discriminating against women and therefore every society has, or in the recent past, used to have a patriarchal system of government that prevented women from being empowered by purposefully prohibiting them from taking on positions of power within the government. Martha Alberson Fineman remarks that “Contemporary American law, culture, and political theory restrain the concept of equality as a tool of social justice. Equality in conjunction with a strong emphasis on personal liberty operates as a mandate for curtailing state action, rather than an aspirational measure of the comparative wellbeing of individuals. As a check on state involvement, our cramped notion of equality limits the state’s ability to affirmatively address economic, political, social, and structural inequalities” (Fineman