Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), argued 19 Oct. 1971, decided 22 Nov. 1971 by vote of 7 to 0; Burger for the Court, two seats (to be occupied by Rehnquist and Powell) were vacant. This was the first decision in a century of Fourteenth Amendment litigation to rule that statutory gender discrimination violated the Equal Protection Clause. Earlier cases had established that the clause did not forbid group‐based discrimination as long as the legislature might have some reason for believing the statutory distinction promoted some aspect of the public good. Under this “rational basis test” the Supreme Court had upheld flat bans on the practice of law by women (Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873), prohibitions on women's tending bar (Goesaert v. Cleary, 1948), and blanket exclusions of women from jury service (Hoyt v. Florida, 1961). In Reed the Court ignored this unbroken line of precedents and explained in an extraordinarily short opinion that this case of gender discrimination presented “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause” (p. 76).

The law in question had distinguished categories of preference for selecting administrators of the estates of people deceased intestate. Part of the law preferred spouses to offspring, offspring to parents, parents to siblings, and so on; another preferred males to females within each category. The Reeds were the separated parents of a deceased son. Sally, challenging the statutory gender preference, sued Cecil for the right to administer an estate valued at less than one thousand dollars. After striking down this law in Reed, the Court often used the Reed precedent during the following decade to strike down many other statutes that discriminated on the basis of gender.

See also Equal Protection.

Leslie Friedman Goldstein

REED V. REED

REED V. REED, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), a case deriving from a provision of Idaho probate law preferring men as administrators of the estate of a deceased child, was the first in a series of 1970s cases associated with the future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that successfully challenged laws discriminating on the basis of sex. The case arose when Sally Reed sought to serve as administrator of her deceased teenage son's meager estate. Challenged by her divorced husband Cecil Reed, the boy's father, the case made its way through the Idaho courts to the Supreme Court. Writing the brief, Ginsburg argued that legislative classification by sex served no compelling state interest in this instance. Furthermore, it violated the right of Sally Reed to the even-handed application of governmental action guaranteed by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a unanimous decision, the Court agreed, although the justices differed as to whether the decision encouraged stricter scrutiny of legislation that discriminated on the basis of sex. Subsequent decisions, however, would confirm that Reed marked the beginning of a major effort, using equal protection analysis, to make the law gender neutral.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rhode, Deborah L. Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Jane SherronDe Hart

See alsoCivil Rights and Liberties ; Discrimination: Sex ; Equal Protection of the Law .