A Case for Fair Pay
IN THE DECOROUS WORLD OF THE U.S. SUPREME Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg might as well have been shouting into a bullhorn.
On May 29, 2007, the court ruled 5–4 that Goodyear Tire employee Lilly Ledbetter could not sue the car-industry giant for pay discrimination because she waited too long to file her complaint. Ginsburg had penned the dissent in support of Ledbetter. But rather than leave it at that, RBG moved to get in the last word by reading her opinion aloud—a dramatic judicial move referred to as dissenting from the bench.
“In our view,” declared Ginsburg, the only woman Justice at the time, “the court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.” Her colleagues were not just wrong, but as one court observer put it, “profoundly wrong.”
Ledbetter v. Goodyear didn’t turn Ginsburg into the court’s most fiery dissenter. During her 14 years on the court, RGB had expressed displeasure with the majority bloc multiple times, from her acid dissent in , the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, to t, a controversial partial-birth-abortion case the Justices had heard just two and a half weeks before
