Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become, in her 25th year on the Supreme Court, a bona fide pop-culture icon. She has pithy comebacks slipped into precisely worded dissents , superhuman strength she can do plus pushups , and an instantly recognizable getup black robe, lacy collar, scrunchie.
Now On the Basis of Sex , a Ginsburg biopic starring Felicity Jones as Ginsburg and Armie Hammer as her husband, Martin, is hitting theaters on Christmas Day with the aim of bringing to light her early legal career for those who might not know much about it. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
She met Marty, a chemistry major, at Cornell, and the couple decided to enter the same field. There were only eight other women in her class. While Marty received treatment for testicular cancer in , Ruth took on his coursework as well; when he landed a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia Law School. Along the way, she shattered glass ceilings and racked up accolades: first person to be a member of both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, tied for first in her class at Columbia.
In , Ginsburg obliged and studied up accordingly. The Equal Pay Act, passed in , was the first piece of federal legislation to prohibit sex-based discrimination. Moritz changed that. In the movie, the scene plays out in the same way the Ginsburgs have recounted it : in the fall of , the couple was working in separate rooms in their house when Marty stumbled upon a tax court case and presented it to his wife. But she read this one. A Denver bachelor named Charles Moritz, whose job in publishing required frequent travel, had represented himself in tax court and lost.
It was a perfect test case. Marty worked to persuade Moritz to appeal and commit to taking the case to court to set a precedent even if the government offered to settle which it did. It was the first time a provision of the Internal Revenue Code had been declared unconstitutional.
