Good Morning! Ruth Bader Ginsburg Rules.

And Dahlia Lithwick explains one of the many reasons why:

The Ginsburgs not only prevailed at the 10th Circuit but also obtained—as Justice Ginsburg has detailed elsewhere—the solicitor general's Exhibit E, a "printout from the Department of Defense computer" that listed, title by title, every provision of the U.S. Code "containing differentiations based upon sex-related criteria." According to the brief filed by the solicitor general urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Moritz, the 10th Circuit decision "casts a cloud of unconstitutionality upon the many federal statutes listed in Appendix E." And as Martin Ginsburg noted in his speech, that computer printout proved "a gift beyond price" in his wife's future litigation career.

The Moritz case launched Ginsburg into her association with the ACLU Women's Rights Project, and Exhibit E offered a roadmap for litigation. She scored five victories in six Supreme Court appeals, using the 14th Amendment to slowly and systematically eradicate gender discrimination in one law after another, pushing the courts to scrutinize laws that classify on the basis of gender with a standard higher than the deferential "rational basis" standard.

...Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn't even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it's almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg's lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure. I don't have an easy answer to the question of whether real feminists are about prominent lipsticky displays of "girl-power," but I do know that Ginsburg's lifetime dedication to achieving quiet, dignified equality made such displays possible.

Read the whole thing here.

[H/T to Shaker Phyllis.]