Brown Boy Blog

The case I had to comment on for the Law Review write-on was Ledbetter v. Goodyear (127 S. Ct. 2162) which is essentially a gender discrimination case gone awry because the lady didn’t know she was being discriminated against for a very long time. Goodyear just paid her less than the men who did the same job and after years of diminshed pay raises Ms. Ledbetter ended up with a salary that was close to half of what the men were getting. The Supremes busted Ms. Ledbetter on a statute of limitations issue which was rather horrid. In fact in my paper I called the Supreme’s reasoning, ‘a bacchanalian feast of tepid reasoning’. I frankly thought that she probably would have lost on an evidentiary basis. And if anything that’s the way you should lose. Congress is in the midst of debating an amendment to the civil right’s act that says if you continue to pay someone based on a discriminatory pay decision then every paycheck constitutes a discriminatory act. It’s affectionately called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007. Obviously the Bush administration has threathened to veto.

I didn’t realise how much of a feminist an egalitarian I was until I wrote this paper. Thinking about the Ledbetter case just had me so riled up because it was so unfair to Ms. Ledbetter to get treated like pish just because she is a woman. But then I shouldn’t expect much. Out here in the upper echelons of education and the rarefied air of reasoning, female law students are ‘fatwa’-ed into wearing skirt suits for interviews and pant suits are proscribed. Funny I didn’t know the location of the female reasoning cells were below their knees. Ridiculous isn’t it. Female law students, forget interviewing in your ‘conservative pumps and pearls’ and move to Afghanistan. At least there they’re not hypocrites and hate you for what you are - a woman!

To hear what Ms. Ledbetter has to say check out  her op-ed yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor