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This article from a law review reproduces Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s address to the National Association of Women Judges and is inscribed by Ginsburg to either Suzanne Nossel or Elizabeth Westfall, who authored Presumed Equal: What America’s Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms, based on surveys sent to women attorneys in 1995. Ginsburg’s address highlights the contributions of three “way pavers” for women in the judiciary: Florence Ellinwood Allen (1884-1966), Burnita Shelton Matthews (1894-1988), and Shirley Mount Hufstedler (1925-2016).

RUTH BADER GINSBURG and Laura W. Brill. “Women In the Federal Judiciary: Three Way Pavers and the Exhilarating Change President Carter Wrought,” Fordham Law Review 64 (November 1995): 281-290. Inscribed by Justice Ginsburg on the front wrapper: “Cheers on the publication of Presumed Equal / Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” ca. 1997. 10 pp.

Inventory #27857       Price: $25,000

Excerpts
“When I attended law school, as other 1950s and 1960s graduates will attest, only a handful of women served as judges in the entire nation.” (281)

“Judge Allen became the first woman to serve on any state’s highest court, and for that achievement, she earned the accolade ‘Portia of the Prairies.’ She served on the Ohio Supreme Court for eleven years.” (283)

“In 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt named Judge Allen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. At age fifty, she became the first woman in the nation appointed to an Article III federal appeals court.” (283)

“After Judge Allen’s 1934 appointment, no women ascended to the federal bench for fifteen years. Then, in 1949, President Harry Truman appointed Burnita Shelton Matthews to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She was the first female Article III federal trial court judge in the nation.” (284)

“At a time when women faced much professional hostility, Judge Matthews showed her confidence in women lawyers by hiring only women as law clerks.” (285)

“Despite the stellar examples set by Judges Florence Allen, Burnita Matthews, and Shirley Hufstedler, it was not until the election and administration of Jimmy Carter that women gained appointment to the federal bench in more than token numbers. President Carter changed the face of the federal bench.... President Carter appointed some forty women to lifetime federal judgeships.” (287)

“If the first women judges were here today, they would rejoice at this achievement. They would also advise vigilance, I believe, in maintaining the trend. We should learn by their examples—their persistence and fortitude—to do our best for the sake of the law and for the sake of those for whom we pave the way.” (289)

Historical Background
This article began as an address presented by Justice Ginsburg at the Annual Conference of the National Association of Women Judges in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 7, 1995. With her former law clerk, she revised it for publication by the Fordham Law Review.

Harvard Law School alumnae Nossel and Westfall compiled a second edition of Presumed Equal in 1998, and fellow Harvard Law School students Lindsay Blohm and Ashley Riveira issued a third edition in 2006, each assessing the experiences of women attorneys from a larger pool of returned surveys.

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) was born in Brooklyn into a Jewish family and graduated in 1954 from Cornell University, where she met Martin D. Ginsburg. They married a month after her graduation, and they moved to Oklahoma, where he was stationed in the U.S. Army Reserve. Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1956 but transferred to Columbia Law School in New York after two years and graduated in 1959. She held a clerkship for a federal judge and then worked at Columbia Law School on international law. She was a professor at Rutgers Law School from 1963 to 1972 and at Columbia Law School from 1972 to 1980. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union to combat gender discrimination. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. She served as a liberal voice on the Supreme Court and authored many important opinions. Ginsburg died of complications from pancreatic cancer and was replaced on the court by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Laura W. Brill (b. 1965) graduated from Brown University in 1987 and from Columbia University School of Law in 1994. She served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and for Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She is a founding partner of the firm of Kendall Brill & Kelly in Los Angeles, California, and specializes in entertainment law.

Condition: Minor creases; else, fine.