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The War on Women in the Courts
In 2007, five men on the Supreme Court told Lilly Ledbetter that she was out of luck. Ledbetter, after two decades working as the only female supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, had sued her employer for wage discrimination–she had discovered that for all those years she had been paid less than male colleagues doing the same job. But the Supreme Court told her that the way they did the math it was too late for her to sue.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais-Pool/Getty Images)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at that time the only woman on the Supreme Court, took the unusual step of reading her dissenting opinion from the bench, accusing the five-Justice majority of not understanding the reality of Ledbetter’s situation. She declared, “In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”
The Ledbetter case was a stark example of what it means to have women judges and justices on the bench. Many great pro-equality decisions have been made by male judges, and women judges are by no means guaranteed to rule in favor of female litigants. But having women on the courts means that women’s voices are heard in the halls of justice.
Cases before the Supreme Court, and the confirmation of Supreme Court justices, get plenty of attention. But for every Lilly Ledbetter there are hundreds of Americans seeking justice from federal courts across the country. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from law school in 1959, there were two women on the federal courts. By the time she read her dissent in Ledbetter, approximately a quarter of federal judges were women. Today, women make up nearly one third of the federal judiciary.
The increase in women in the courts has not happened by accident. As more women graduate from law schools, some presidents have made it a priority to have the federal courts reflect the people they serve. It’s well known that President Obama picked two women–Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan–to sit on the Supreme Court. Less noticed has been his unprecedented success in bringing women to federal courts throughout the country. Almost half of President Obama’s confirmed judicial nominees have been women. Only one fifth of George W. Bush’s were [PDF].
President Obama has made no secret of his goal to make the American courts look like America. Along with the effort to bring more women to the bench, roughly 36 percent of his nominees have been people of color, and he has nominated more openly lesbian and gay individuals to the federal courts than all his predecessors combined.
But the president’s effort to bring a diversity of voices to the federal courts is now facing a major roadblock. Senate Republicans have been obstructing President Obama’s judicial nominees to an unprecedented extent–usually not because of objections to the nominees themselves, but just for the sake of creating gridlock. Indeed, most of President Obama’s nominees have been approved by the Judiciary Committee with unanimous or near-unanimous bipartisan support. Nevertheless, after committee approval, Republicans in the Senate have forced the president’s nominees to wait four times longer to get a yes-or-no vote than President Bush’s nominees at the same point in his term.
As a result, about one out of ten courtrooms in the country are vacant and Americans are facing inexcusable delays as they seek their day in court. One of President Obama’s least-noticed but most long-lasting achievements–putting a qualified, diverse group of judges on our federal courts–has been put at risk.
Senate Democrats have signaled that they will try to push through the 18 judicial nominees currently waiting for votes, including seven women and eight people of color. But they can only do it if Americans–and especially women–speak out about the importance of filling our courts.
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6 Comments so far
Show All"President Obama has made no secret of his goal to make the American courts look like America."
Although I agree we need many more women on the bench, the courts will never look like America, because only the 1% get to sit on the courts.
We have a number of huge flaws in our system of justice and the way we select judges ranks at or near the very top. We pick judges in America on the basis of who they know, not what they know. Political correctness and recommendations from the right political party count much more than competence or whether the person has the right stuff for the job. And we let anyone who wants to become a judge apply for the job. We have no decent recognizable training methods for lawyers, much less judges.
You never will see a lawyer who has worked for the poor all of her life get a seat on the US supreme court. Sonia Sotomayor at least participated in the Puerto Rican Defense Fund while she worked as a corporate lawyer in NYC. Nor for that matter will you see many lawyers who worked for the poor on the federal bench.
The one major exception to that rule, Thurgood Marshall, got his seat in 1967, probably the only time in US history when that could have happened. And Marshall spent much of his career writing in dissent in death penalty cases, along with William Brennan, because the 1% has also loved the death penalty.
As a result we get a tremendous amount of stupid, angry people on the bench, out to avenge thousands of slights they have felt through their lives. We get racists. We get stupid people who will never learn the law.
The idea that the Supreme Court gets to rule over the House and Senate is fiction and something we have to begin to address. Thsi is nonsense.
Granted, we do need women in government -- i.e., we need Gender Balance laws which would provide for 40% to 60% representation by females.
Ms. Baker, I would like to refer you to the DSM-4, which lists the designation "Legal Abuse Syndrome", which is a form of PTSD. Many of the women experiencing the trauma of court situations like you are describing will later find themselves suffering the effects of Legal Abuse Syndrome, so it would be good to make it known.
Women are also suffering this syndrome because they have been traumatized by the courts, having their children taken away from them for no other reason than that they are poor. Rather than help families stay together in healthy ways, we split them up and blame the mother!
Yet, I don't see women's groups fighting this abuse! I guess they figure it won't ever happen to them, since they aren't poor, and don't think they ever will be.
This is a very sick society, and we are inflicting trauma on many different people. It is time that we begin detailing what is happening to so many, and it is time we begin taking action, even though it is not happening to *us*.
This article is a good start, Ms. Baker. I hope you will widen the range to include so many more of us who are suffering from the same things, but don't get acknowledged or heard.
While I'm glad to see that Ms. Baker is discussing the war on women in the courts, there are so few people that address the war on males (and families by proxy) in the courts. In our zeal to overturn entrenched biases against females in our society, we have allowed the pendulum to swing too far toward giving females all the rights, with very little in the way of corresponding responsibilities.
When women can falsely accuse men of sexual assault and child molestation without any recourse; when parenthood is a choice for women but a duty for men; when males are still widely treated as utilities for the support and maintenance of women and children, while women are freed from the old gender roles and from their old social contractual obligations; this has become an injustice that simply cannot be ignored. Cry patriarchy all you want but, the vast majority of men have never had such power over women as our current social order allows them to have.
I say that we all, regardless of gender, ethnicity, culture or class need to stand together to rid our societal structures of the rot and corruption, foisted upon us by those who would rule us all. We need equal opportunities for all peoples and to let go of our special interests. Either we are one people or we're not. Simple as that.
Let me guess. You're either unmarried or you really got your ass nailed in a divorce.
Your second paragraph is one of the most pathetic whines that I've seen or heard. This post is completely divorced from reality.
We are not one people.
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I can't stop you from guessing, nor would I if I could. As for your ad hominem about my post, I'll not respond to that. You were clear that you don't consider me to be "people" and therein lies the problem. You cannot marginalize anyone and claim to be owed justice. If you (meaning those who would use their power to only benefit their group) are unjust and unequal, then any reaction to that is simply your just desserts. For all the talk about oppression from supporters of "womens' rights", they are loath to acknowledge any oppression that doesn't preserve their status as victims, just as racial supremacists and other special interest groups are. Oppression isn't ended by becoming the oppressors and equality doesn't spring up from inequality. Ignore this truth at your peril.