Chapter 3

Yes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) was effectively up against her Harvard Law School teachers in a sense. When she argued Reed v. Reed in 1971, the landmark case that made her famous for gender equality, she was challenging entrenched legal precedents that were supported by many legal scholars and institutions, including those from Harvard. These professors would have been part of the legal tradition that RBG sought to change by successfully arguing that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment should apply to gender discrimination. While it wasn’t a direct confrontation with her teachers in court, her advocacy fundamentally opposed the views held by many of the Harvard Law faculty of her time.

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In the movie On the Basis of Sex, which dramatizes Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early legal battles, it’s true that her Harvard professors are depicted as being part of the institutional establishment she was up against, particularly when she argued the Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue case. This case involved Charles Moritz, a man denied a tax deduction that women or married men could claim. Ginsburg and her husband Marty took on the case to challenge the legal framework that enforced gender discrimination.

Some of the characters representing the government in the film, like Erwin Griswold, who was the Dean of Harvard Law during Ginsburg’s time as a student, were real figures in the legal establishment. Griswold, who later became Solicitor General, did indeed defend the IRS’s position in the Moritz case. So, in that sense, she was directly arguing against her former professors and their government roles, making this confrontation a significant point in her career and part of the broader battle against gender inequality entrenched in both academia and government policy.

The film captures this personal dimension, as it juxtaposes her early challenges at Harvard with her later legal fights against the institutional norms her professors represented.