Reply #7: this is what the Oxford Companion to SCOTUS says about Reed

[hfojvt]

"Earlier cases had established that the clause did not forbid group based discrimination as long as the legislature might have some reason for believing the statutory distinction promoted some aspect of the public good. Under this 'rational basis test' the Supreme Court had upheld flat bans on the practice of law by women (Bradwell v. Illinois 1873), prohbitions on women's tending bar (Goesaert v. Cleary 1948) and blanket exclusions of women from jury service (Hoyt v. Florida 1961. In Reed the Court ignored this unbroken line of precedents and explained in an extraorinarily short opinion that this case of gender discrimination presented 'the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal protection clause'.

The law in question had distinguished categories of preference for selecting administrators of the estates of people deceased intestate. Part of the law preferred spouses to offspring, offspring to parents, parents to siblings, and so on; another preferred males to females within each category. The Reeds were the separated parents of a deceased son.... After striking down this law in Reed, the Court often used the Reed precedent in the following decade to strike down many other statutes that discriminated on the basis of gender." Oxford Companion to SCOTUS 2005 p. 830


People might get a kick out of this too. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator." op cit p. 97-98

And people think Scalia is bad. :rofl:

I think the Court was wrong to strike down Reed. How else are you gonna decide between a mother and a father? Or a son and a daughter? (okay in that case, it would be logical to go by age (except for the fact that all four of us younger kids would be howling at the idea of my older sister being given precedence, the horror, the horror)) Or a brother and a sister? (in that case age is less logical) Does it depend on which way the arrow is pointing? Are you gonna go by age? Flip a coin? Investigate to decide who was closer to the deceased in affection? And never mind that anybody who doesn't like the way the law is written can get around it by writing down their own preferences.