I could be on that brief. Oh, on the least compelling end of it -- if anyone could make it through law school with a new baby, which has certainly been done, I had enough resources to manage. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have, though.
I thought it was effective too. After skimming the thing, I started to flip through the names at the end, and almost immediately found someone I've litigated with (and been friendly towards) for a decade. We had an email exchange last week. And then a few pages later, a former partner.
I'm afraid this kind of recognition is less likely among the rarefied bubble elitists at the Court, whether justice or clerk. Unless, of course, they made a real effort to recruit classmates of clerks, former partners of justices, etc.
Cassandane could be on it. I've talked about that obliquely and/or Presidentially just because it's mainly her story rather than mine, but here, what the hell, it's a propos.
I agree on the value. I was also struck that the first several examples were specifically about not wanting to follow the pattern that had been set by the writer's mother. I've never thought about not wanting to be that sort of example to my children but I don't, and I'm wondering as an aside how to square that with the general conversations about whether our children will be able to do better than we've done and middle-class parenting values in general. But that's not really what this is about, just an aside.
I think it will be effective but it's depressing because its effectiveness depends precisely on soliciting class solidarity among lawyerly elites, or in particular the one elite who matters and who is persuadable by this kind of class solidarity, Anthony Kennedy.
Like that story about Bowers v. Hartwick, where Powell said he didn't know anyone gay at the time he decided anti-sodomy laws were constitutional. Admittedly, wikipedia says that one isn't true.
Wikipedia can say what it thinks it unconstitutional all it wants, but it would have been more helpful if Powell had agreed.
Will these women start receiving death threats? I predict "yes".
It's interesting that the argument moves from "[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life .." to securing the reproductive rights on which that abilility depends. That's always seemed to me intuitively why we want abortion rights, but a right to bodily autonomy for its own sake is easier to frame as basic.
We've had this conversation before, and my position seems to draw unsympathetic reactions, but yes, bodily autonomy and I'd rhetorically strengthen that to self-defense. Pregnancy involves pain and damage, some of which is permanent. I had about the easiest pregnancies I've heard about, but if you described the symptoms, and the lifelong aftermath, as an illness it'd sound like a huge, scary deal.
Now, people don't think about it that way, because if you want kids, you're happy about it and it's worth it and you don't want to guilt-trip them. But carrying a pregnancy involves real physical pain and damage that women are entitled to protect themselves from.
I don't understand why you'd want to foreclose the option of guilt tripping your kids.
10: and risk to life! In terms of danger of death, giving birth in the US is roughly equivalent to serving a month as a US soldier in Iraq.
Just this morning was at the PT on a short notice bc left leg had deteriorated & was giving out when stepped up a curb, walked up one of SF's gentle slopes, got on a bus, went up stairs wo a friendly banister! Yes I adore the kid, but it would be so nice to go back to mere extreme hyper mobility!
I have hopes this limited lawyerly solidarity will spread to other fields, and really the range of backgrounds represented is very broad. There is at least one woman who says she argues before the court, I suspect those who obsessively track these things have already picked out the most glittering names.
It's interesting that the argument moves from "[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life .." to securing the reproductive rights on which that abilility depends. That's always seemed to me intuitively why we want abortion rights, but a right to bodily autonomy for its own sake is easier to frame as basic.
Maybe easier to frame as basic, but harder to engender empathy in someone like Kennedy, who could seems perfectly willing to constrain autonomy on the basis of hypothetical mental states.