Opening the Door: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Law’s Boundaries, and the Gender of Opportunities

A pervasive assumption is that nation-states have bounded legal regimes. Yet the burdens imposed on women in the name of gender and sexuality have not been circumscribed by jurisdictional lines. Rather, gender hierarchies have traveled--by way of Roman law, civil law, the common law, and religious systems--to impose constraints on women living under autocracies, republican democracies, and other political forms. The many laws supporting gender inequalities make plain that legal rules internal to a nation-state are often not indigenous to a particular polity but, instead, are regularly shaped by cross-border influences. Similarly, efforts to interrupt inequalities know no jurisdictional bounds. In tension with the classical model of state-to-state international law production, human rights movements of this and of other eras result from diverse exchanges across jurisdictional hierarchies. Illustrative are the equality projects of earlier centuries--emancipation for slaves and equality for women of all colors--that spanned oceans through networks of local religious and secular societies communicating (before the internet) via the post, pamphleteering, and the press to demand legal reforms. (2) Indeed, one can understand women's groups as the original "NGOs"--organizations that were nongovernmental not by choice but by exclusion and yet remarkably generative. During the twentieth century, efforts to interrupt gender hierarchies intensified. Major transnational markers include the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which in 1948 recognized rights of "[e]veryone and without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, ... or other status." (3) A second landmark of that century is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which came into force in 1981. CEDAW aims to cabin the burdens of gender by insisting that state parties undertake "appropriate measures" ranging across "all fields" (including "the political, social, economic, and cultural") so as "to ensure the full development and advancement of women, for the purpose of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men." (4) Now ratified by 187 countries, CEDAW has proven to be a prompt for legislation and court decisions in various jurisdictions, (5) as well as for critical commentary, including from members of the United States Senate, which has not ratified the treaty. A third transnational agreement that reflects a new appreciation for women's status is the 1998 Rome Statute, creating the International Criminal Court. This treaty is the first to recognize the impact of crimes against humanity on women and the need to have women participate not only because they are victims of such crimes but also because they should serve in decision making roles as prosecutors and judges. (6) This stream of activities brings me, of course, to Justice Ginsburg. By border-crossing in law, we are following the route that Justice Ginsburg charted. Long before comparative law and international law were the familiar (and debated) topics that they have now become, Justice Ginsburg was exposing gender inequalities through a comparative and transnational lens. She understood that law was and is a source of gendered identities, and not only a result. Hence, she proffered examples of legal regimes whose alternative rules denaturalized the sex-gender classifications that American law had imposed. As is familiar, in her brief filed in the United States Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed, (7) the 1970 case about the Idaho statutory preference for men over women as administrators of estates, then-lawyer Ginsburg drew on her knowledge of Sweden (8) (where she had lived and studied comparative procedure). In her brief, she mixed voluminous American sources (federal and state statutes, case law, legislative history, executive orders, and reams of statistics on women's participation in the labor market, household, juries, higher education, and law reviews) with John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexis de Tocqueville, Sojourner Truth, Swedish essays on the "Changing Roles of Men and Women," a report to the U. …