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RANDY STAPILUS The Idaho Column |
To most non-lawyers, the Idaho-originated Supreme Court case of Reed v. Reed is a little obscure now, not one of those few like Roe v. Wade many people could grasp immediately.
But Reed was a pivot in modern society, and it's especially worth recalling now with the death last week of Allen Derr, the soft-spoken Boise lawyer who improbably pushed it to the highest court in the land and was a central part of changing the law as it applies to men and women in America.
(Disclosure here: Last year I worked for a time with Derr on a book about the case; he apparently was still at work assembling materials for that project at the time of his death.)
Up to 1971, the law often treated the genders differently. Illinois had a law barring women from practicing law; the Supreme Court upheld it. It also upheld an Oregon law limiting work hours for women but not for men, and a Michigan law keeping women from tending bar. There were many such laws around the country, and for decades the Supreme Court had a perfect record of sustaining them.
The Idaho law that got Sally Reed's, and Allen Derr's, dander up, seemed just one more of the kind.
Reed encountered it when in March 1967 Reed's son, Skip, died and left behind a few personal effects and $495 in a savings account. (That was the treasure over which a nation's laws would change.) She and her ex-husband Cecil, the boy's father, each applied in probate court to be administrator of Skip's estate. Cecil got the appointment, but not, as the judge acknowledged, because Sally Reed was in any way disqualified. It was because the Idaho Code on probate said this: “Of several persons claiming and equally entitled to administer, males must be preferred to females, and relatives of the whole to those of the half blood.†In other words, Cecil had an automatic preference because he was male. (more…)