Ruth Bader Ginsburg owes her place in history not to her judicial career but to her groundbreaking work as a young attorney, when she persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to write women’s rights into the Constitution. Dr. Philippa Strum will draw on her interviews with RBG to trace the way the future Justice furthered gender equality rights in spite of a Supreme Court which, in RBG’s words, “never saw a gender discrimination law it didn’t like.”
Philippa Strum, Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is the Center’s former Director of the Division of United States Studies as well as Broeklundian Professor of Political Science Emerita, City University of New York. After teaching political science (U.S. government and constitutional law; civil liberties and human rights; women, law and politics) at City University of New York for more than two decades, Dr. Strum became a visiting professor of constitutional law and civil liberties at Wayne State University Law School.
She has published widely on topics such as the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. presidency, civil liberties, and women and politics. Among her books are Speaking Freely: Whitney v. California and American Speech Law (2015); Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights (2010); Women in the Barracks: The VMI Case and Equal Rights (2002, named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book). Her book When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for the Speech We Hate (1999) and her book about the Mendez case were recipients of American Bar Association awards. She is also the author of Privacy: The Debate in the United States Since 1945 (1998); Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism (1993); The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex in the Palestinian Revolution (1992); Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (1984), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and many other titles. Her most recent book, On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law, was published in 2022.
Register before 5 p.m. the Sunday before for in-person lunch ($10) or by the next evening for the Zoom link.
For more information, please email Lunch and Learn.