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Justice Ginsburg and the Price of Equality

2017-06-24 4 Dailymotion

Justice Ginsburg and the Price of Equality<br />The greater burden placed on unwed fathers, she wrote in the new case, reflected age-old assumptions about unmarried parenthood and a stereotyped view of an unwed father’s ability to be a responsible parent: “Overbroad generalizations of<br />that order, the court has come to comprehend, have a constraining impact, descriptive though they may be of the way many people still order their lives.” The law’s distinction between men and women, she wrote, “is stunningly anachronistic.”<br />It was pure Ginsburg.<br />In her opinion, Justice Ginsburg addressed why “this court is not equipped to grant the relief Morales-Santana seeks.” She explained<br />that the general rule set by Congress for conveying citizenship to foreign-born children when the parents are married subjects citizen fathers and mothers to the longer residency requirement.<br />Congress itself should fix the problem, Justice Ginsburg wrote,<br />but until it does — an optimistic “in the interim” — the five-year residency requirement for unmarried fathers will now apply to unmarried mothers as well.<br />Justice Ginsburg’s distinctive voice was evident throughout the opinion, which drew on the sex discrimination cases she argued and won before the Supreme Court as a young advocate for women’s rights (many of those cases, like this one, had male plaintiffs) as well as on a landmark majority opinion she delivered early in her Supreme Court tenure<br />that forced the all-male Virginia Military Institute to admit women.<br />Although Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, the Dominican-born man who brought the case — and whose United States citizen father failed by just 20 days to meet the 10-year residency requirement<br />that was in effect when Luis was born — won his constitutional argument, his victory was a hollow one.<br />The question for the court, she continued, was what choice Congress would have made had it known<br />that the exception was constitutionally vulnerable: Would it have extended the exception to unwed fathers, or would it have withheld it from the mothers?

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