Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the topper of Columbia Law’s Class of 1959, could find no law firm in New York willing to hire a female attorney. Yet, she was not one to give up. Taking to academia, she became a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, teaching some of the first female law students there. In 1971, she appeared before the Nine with her lead brief in Reed v. Reed, where the court was considering whether men should be preferred over women as executors. Ginsburg won the first gender discrimination case of the court in USA. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and, under this banner, took numerous causes to the court on which she would one day go on to sit as a Justice herself. Interestingly, the current legal landscape in Pakistan is quite similar for female lawyers to what Ginsburg consistently fought against in the US. It continues to be a hostile and unwelcoming environment for them, with little progress over the years. While women are increasingly taking up space in public and private law schools across the country, their presence is almost non-existent in the top echelons of legal practice and the judiciary.
Watch the forty-seventh session of LUMS Live: Remembering Justice Ginsburg: Confronting Women’s Challenges in Pakistan’s Legal Fraternity. Organised in collaboration with the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (SWGI), the distinguished panelists for the discussion included Justice (R) Nasira Iqbal, Ms. Reema Omer and Ms. Nida Usman Chaudhary.
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LUMS Live