Thread by @theheatherhogan

Here's one of my favorite Ruth Bader Ginsburg stories: In 1960, Harvard Law Professor Albert Sachs suggested Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter take on his star student — Ginsburg — as a clerk. Frankfurter was a notorious sexist and said no because Ginsburg was a woman.

One of Frankfurter's most misogynistic rulings was from 1948, when he wrote the majority opinion in Goesaert v. Cleary, upholding a Michigan law that prohibited women from obtaining bartender licenses, unless the bars where they worked were owned by their fathers or husbands.

The plaintiff in the case, Valentine Goesaert, challenged the law on the ground that gender discrimination infringed on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Frankfurter ruled against her.

In 1976, when RBG was working for the ACLU, SCOTUS was set to hear another case in which the plaintiff argued that gender discrimination was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Only this time, the person being discriminated against was a man.

Craig v. Boren. The plaintiff argued that Oklahoma's law allowing women to buy beer at 18 but men to wait until 21 was unconstitutional. RBG offered to file an amicus curiae brief on behalf of a plaintiff and was present during oral arguments.

She rolled up into SCOTUS and said, "I’m delighted to see the Supreme Court is interested in beer drinkers," a clear dig at Frankfurter. She followed that up by asking over and over if SCOTUS was really going to allow a law to stand that gave women more rights than men.

Obviously they were not! The case became the first in which SCOTUS applied intermediate scrutiny to an administrative statute governed by gender. RBG had been working toward that ruling for YEARS; she knew it would take a man being discriminated against to make it happen.

Because of RBG, SCOTUS overturned Frankfurter's beloved Goesaert v. Cleary ruling, on a case that also was about beer! Once she got her bedrock ruling, she took it back to the ACLU and won a bazillion cases on behalf of women being discriminated against.

So many, in fact, that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause — which the man who first denied RBG entry to the Supreme Court had refused to apply to women — became fondly colloquially known as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Equal Protection Clause.