Each week, we tell the story of what happens when individual people confront deeply held American ideals in their own lives. We're interested in the cultural and political contradictions that reveal who we are.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/experiment
episode 11: How RBG Became ‘Notorious’
In her fight for women’s rights, the then–ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg did something unexpected: She argued on behalf of men.
“It didn’t matter to her if the plaintiff was a man or a woman,” says the Georgetown law professor Wendy Williams. “Because in most of those cases, the discrimination against the man was derivative of a prior and worse discrimination against the woman.”
Craig v. Boren involved Oklahoma frat boys, a drive-through convenience store, and gender-specific beer laws. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1976 decision was foundational in advancing equal rights for women and represented a key moment in the future justice’s career.
This story originally ran on More Perfect, a Radiolab spin-off about the Supreme Court.
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