Can a law prefer males over females in the administration of an estate to which they both have equal claims?

Bills dealing with trusts and estates are heard by my committee but not this one.

Idaho passed such a law in 1864.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the attorneys who successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 1971 that the statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

I first read that case, Reed v. Reed, as a law student in 1974 in a class entitled Sex Discrimination and the Law.  The professor was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Much of the oral argument today on the Defense of Marriage Act dealt with whether DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause because it treated same-sex marriages differently than heterosexual unions.

Justice Ginsburg reminded the Court that “in the very first gender discrimination case, Reed v. Reed, the court did something it had never done in the history of the court under rational basis” [the test for determining that a law is constitutional if there is a rational basis for its enactment].  “The Court said this is rank discrimination and it failed.”

I attended today’s oral argument.

It made me very proud to have been a student of Professor Ginsburg.