Citing Her Own Work, Ginsburg Strikes Down Discriminatory Citizenship Law
That’s MTV Award Winner Ruth Bader Ginsburg to you Image by Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited her own work from her time as a civil rights lawyer as ruled on Monday that laws that treat unwed fathers and mothers differently when granting citizenship to children born abroad are unconstitutional.
Under current law, children of American mothers and non-U.S. fathers could become citizens as long as their mother lived in the U.S. for one year, but in the reverse scenario, the American father must have lived in the States for at least 10 years, five of which past age 14.
Ginsburg wrote in her opinion, which was joined by five other justices, that different requirements for different genders “date from an era when the lawbooks of our Nation were rife with overbroad generalizations about the way men and women are.”
The Washington Post noted that Ginsburg “cited a long list of cases she had a hand in — either as a lawyer arguing before the court or as a justice — striking laws that treated men and women differently in, for instance, receiving Social Security survivor benefits or being admitted to the Virginia Military Academy.”
Contact Jesse Bernstein at bernstein@forward.com or on Twitter @__jbernstein
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