SCOTUS Puts A Stop To Pandemic-Related Challenges | Remembering The Class Of RBG
July 22, 2020
TODAY IN HISTORY
|On this day in 1937, the U.S. Senate rejected PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
YOU SHALL NOT PASS
|Richard Wolf with USA Today reports on the Supreme Court’s handling of various lawsuits that have been fueled by the pandemic. Touching on issues such as voting access, church gatherings, and others challenging public health policies that have gone into effect to slow the spread of the coronavirus, all of these lawsuits have met a roadblock at SCOTUS. Wolf notes, “Taken together, the high court’s actions signal a desire to leave the pandemic in public officials’ hands – an effort that may prove difficult as Election Day draws near.”
BUSTED OUT
|The House is expected to vote today to remove from the U.S. Capitol a bust of CHIEF JUSTICE ROGER B. TANEY, the author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared African Americans couldn’t be citizens. The bust sits outside of a room where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860 — the same room where Taney announced the Dredful decision.
THE CLASS OF RBG
|Dahlia Lithwick and Molly Olmstead with Slate unveiled a new project that tells stories from the “Class of RBG” — specifically, the stories of nine other women in JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S Harvard Law class of ’59. It took more than a year, but Lithwick and Olmstead tracked down the surviving women and interviewed them for a special two-episode podcast. Lithwick wrote of the conversations with these women: “We gathered their reflections on hazing at Harvard, professional setbacks and frustrations, relationships and child rearing, and the progress of the feminist legal movement. We found that while these women did keep tabs on one another, and sometimes cheered one another on from afar, they were mostly very busy, consumed by their own careers and families and goals. Instead of a tale of easy camaraderie, we learned that the extraordinary pressures on these women didn’t always create a sisterhood. Sometimes, the pressures even drove them apart.”
WHAT WE DO TO WOMEN
|Of course, any project that looks at the life and times of RUTH BADER GINSBURG wouldn’t be complete without a conversation with the justice herself. The conversation with Ginsburg focused on her time at Harvard Law and included a re-telling of the famous story of the school’s dean asking all the women in her class to stand up and explain why they were taking the place of a man at Harvard. They also discussed a practice known as “ladies’ day” where women had to answer all the questions in class and even sing when asked to.