page_title: Birch Bayh
section_title: Advocacy and honors
hierarchical_section_title: Birch Bayh / Post-Senate career / Advocacy and honors
caption_attribution_description: English: Former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), right, with his son Christopher and wife Katherine, at the dedication of the Birch Bayh Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Indianapolis, 2003.
context_page_description: Birch Evans Bayh Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1963 to 1981. He was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the twenty-fifth—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the only non-Founding Father to have authored two constitutional amendments. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the Electoral College.
  Bayh authored Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which bans gender discrimination in higher education institutions that receive federal funding.
context_section_description: In 1981, Bayh joined Robert Drinan, Don Edwards, Edith Green, Patsy Mink and Pat Schroeder to file an amicus brief before the Supreme Court in the case of North Haven Board of Education v. Bell. The brief urged affirmance of the lower court's decision that Title IX proscribes employment discrimination in federally funded education programs. The court agreed. On August 19, 2004, Bayh filed an amicus brief in another case relating to Title IX, Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education. Bayh urged reversal of the lower court's holding; the Supreme Court agreed, reversing the 11th Circuit and holding that Title IX created a private right of action to parties alleging retaliation for reporting sex discrimination.
  On December 23, 2010, Bayh filed an amicus brief in Stanford v. Roche, a case in which the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the Bayh–Dole Act required that ownership patents for inventions resulting from federally funded research must automatically go to the federal contractor. Bayh argued that "a federal contractor's ownership rights to inventions covered by the Bayh-Dole Act cannot be terminated unilaterally by an individual inventor through a separate agreement purporting to assign the inventor's rights to a third party." The court disagreed, writing that "the Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically vest title to federally funded inventions in federal contractors or authorize contractors to unilaterally take title to such inventions."
  Bayh continued to advocate for the direct election of the president, speaking with lawmakers around the country about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states agree to pledge their presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote once a majority of presidential electors join the compact. Bayh served on the advisory board of the non-profit, National Popular Vote, Inc.
  Bayh served as a member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, as co-chair of the University of Virginia's Miller Center National Commission on Presidential Disability and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and as founding chairman of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence.
  In 2003, Indianapolis's historic U.S. Courthouse and Post Office was renamed in Bayh's honor as the Birch Bayh Federal Building and United States Courthouse.
  In 2009, Indiana State University named their College of Education after the Bayh family; Senator Bayh was the fourth member of the Bayh family to attend Indiana State University (following his grandmother, father and mother); his late wife, Marvella Hern Bayh, was also an alumna of Indiana State University.
caption: Bayh, right, with his son Christopher and wife Kitty in Indianapolis, 2003.
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