If you love Sarah Palin and loathe Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you might want to avoid Dahlia Lithwick's "The Mother of All Grizzlies" on Slate. Otherwise, regardless of your politics, you probably don't want to miss the piece, which is interesting on many levels. It gives an example of how a legal career can be launched from a single well-handled case -- pro bono, at that. It provides detail about how the law concerning equal rights for women developed. And it offers more evidence of one of the sweetest, richest, and longest love stories in legal history.
The case was an obscure tax case, which Marty Ginsburg, a tax lawyer, identified as promising, but had to talk his wife into reading. When she did, she was hooked. The case was about a contested tax deduction by a single man that would have been allowable had he been a single woman. The case led to Ruth Bader Ginsburg being retained to handled a larger discrimination case, Reed v. Reed, before the U.S. Supreme Court.
There's also a story illustrative of social history:
Ginsburg explained that in the early '70s, her son, "what I called a lively child but school psychologists called hyperactive," was forever in trouble and that she was constantly called in to his school, even though she and her husband both had full-time jobs. "One day, I was particularly weary,"* she explained, and so when the school called, she said, "This child has two parents. I suggest you alternate calls, and it's his father's turn." She said calls from the school came much less frequently after that, because the school was "much less inclined to take a man away from his job."
