On the Basis of Sex

Docudrama focusing on two periods of the young adult life of future US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The first time period is the late 1950s in her stint as a student at Harvard Law School, her class only the sixth after women were admitted to the school and including only nine females. Dean Erwin Griswold makes known in veiled terms to those nine that he would prefer if it was still an all male institution. As such, Ruth knows that she has to work twice as hard as any male student to make herself known, which is made all the more difficult with unexpected issues at home with her fellow Harvard Law School student husband, Martin D. Ginsburg. The second time period is in the early 1970s. Despite wanting to get a job as a trial lawyer at a law firm, no such firm would hire her solely because she is a woman, and despite she finishing at the top of her class. Instead, she is teaching law at Rutgers specializing in sex discrimination in the law, this chosen specialization arguably as she has faced inherent sex discrimination in her chosen career and that she wants to inspire future generations of women to achieve what she has been unable to do herself because of that discrimination. Things change when Marty, now an esteemed tax lawyer, brings to her a case that he feels could change the face of her work, a tax case in which, solely because of the law, there is reverse discrimination, namely against a male, the two who decide to work on the case together, he from the tax side, she from the sex discrimination side. She is eventually able to convince her old friend Mel Wulf at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to provide the organization's official support. Ruth and Marty are told in no uncertain terms that in the strong possibility that they lose, the result could irrevocably set their careers back. Winning is made all the more difficult in they having to work within the structure that supports that sex discrimination as "that's the way it's always been done", and as Ruth has no trial experience, she who can come across as a bitter woman who the world has wronged.