Reed v. Reed - Further Readings

Appellant
Sally Reed
Appellee
Cecil Reed
Appellant's Claim
That Sally Reed's constitutional rights were violated by Idaho's law favoringthe appointment of a man over a similarly situated woman to act as administrator of an estate.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Allen R. Derr, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Chief Lawyers for Appellee
Charles S. Stout, Myron E. Anderson
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Warren E. Burger (writing for the Court), William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
22 November 1971
Decision
That Idaho's law was "based solely on a discrimination prohibited by and therefore violative of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."
Significance
This was the first time in the Fourteenth Amendment's 103-year history that the Supreme Court ruled that its Equal Protection Clause protected women's rights.
Although Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, stated that"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges orimmunities of citizens of the United States . . . nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," the U.S. Supreme Court refused for a century to apply this guarantee to women.
Reed v. Reed was the first case in which the Supreme Court applied theFourteenth Amendment to women's rights. This "turning point case," as Ruth Bader Ginsburg termed it, began with the suicide of a teenager, Richard Lynn Reed. Richard's adoptive parents, Sally and Cecil Reed, had earlier separated.The boy spent his "tender years" in the custody of his mother but was transferred into the custody of his father once he reached his teens. At 19, usinghis father's rifle, Richard killed himself. As Ginsburg remembers, Sally Reedhad deeply opposed her loss of Richard's custody and had felt that her estranged husband bore some responsibility for their son's death.
Since Richard had died without a will, Sally Reed filed an application to actas administrator of Richard's estate. When Cecil Reed filed a similar petition, the Probate Court of Ada County ordered that he be appointed administrator upon his taking the required oath and filing the required bond.
The court reached this decision without considering the parents' relative merits, but strictly in accordance with Idaho's mandatory probate code. Section15-312 provided:

Administration of the estate of a person dying interstate must be granted to some one . . . in the following order:

and 15-314:

[o]f several persons claiming and equally entitled toadminister, males must be preferred to females, and relatives of whole to those of the half blood.

Win Some, Lose Some
Sally Reed appealed the probate court's order to the District Court of the Fourth Judicial District of Idaho. She was represented by Allen R. Derr, who maintained that the Idaho law violated Sally Reed's constitutional rights underthe Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district courtagreed. It held that the two sections of law should be considered void, and directed the probate court to choose between Richard's parents based upon their relative qualifications, regardless of sex.
Cecil Reed quickly appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court. This court rejected the district court's ruling. Finding that Idaho's legislature had "evidently concluded that in general men are better qualified to act as an administratorthan women," and that this was "neither an illogical nor arbitrary method devised by the legislature to resolve an issue that would otherwise require a hearing as to the relative merits . . . of the two or more petitioning relatives," Idaho's Supreme Court reinstated Cecil Reed as administrator of his son'sestate, since he was male.
Equal Protection
Sally Reed appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ginsburg and others associatedwith the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union joinedDerr to represent her. The Court also received amicus curiae, or "friend of the court," briefs from many other organizations. Derr argued Sally Reed's case on 19 October 1971, continuing to insist--as rights advocates had since the 1870s--that women's rights were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. In contrast, Cecil Reed's lawyers defended Idaho's law as providing a reasonable means of streamlining the probate court's workload.
This time, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that women's rights were within the province of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Court's opinion, Chief Justice Burger wrote, "We have concluded that the arbitrary preference established in favor of males . . . cannot stand in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction . . . This Court has consistently recognized thatthe Fourteenth Amendment does not deny to States the power to treat differentclasses of persons in different ways . . . [It] does, however, deny to States the power to legislate that different treatment be accorded to persons placed by a statute into different classes on the basis of criteria wholly unrelated to the objective of that statute. A classification `must be reasonable, not arbitrary . . . '"
Sally Reed and her lawyers thus won for women what Susan B. Anthony, Myra Bradwell, and Virginia Minor had begun to seek in the courts nearly one centurybefore: Fourteenth Amendment protection of women's constitutional rights.
Related Cases

• United States v. Anthony, 24 F.Cas. 829 (1873).
  
• Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875).