Sally and Cecil Reed were a separated married couple who were fighting over which of them would be designated as administrator of the estate of their dead son. Each filed a petition with the
Probate Court of
Ada County, Idaho, asking to be named. Idaho Code specified that "males must be preferred to females" in appointing administrators of estates and the court appointed Cecil as administrator of the estate, valued at less than $1,000. Sally Reed was represented at the Supreme Court by
Idaho lawyer
Allen Derr, who argued that the
Fourteenth Amendment forbids discrimination based on sex. After a series of appeals by both Sally and Cecil Reed, the Supreme Court considered the case and delivered a unanimous decision that held the Idaho Code's preference in favor of males was arbitrary and unconstitutional. Those who brought the case had hoped for a broader decision that would have deemed all classifications based on sex "
suspect classifications", a category the Supreme Court reserved for race. A suspect classification would be held to a more exacting standard of scrutiny known as
strict scrutiny. The
ACLU established its Women's Rights Project under Ginsburg to develop cases to persuade the court to treat sex-based distinctions that way. Hundreds of laws were changed after the
Reed v. Reed ruling. "Congress went through all of the provisions of the
U.S. Code and changed almost all that classified overtly on the basis of gender. So Congress and the Court were in sync." This court case created the opportunity to analyze laws that dealt with sex-based classifications.
Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp. reached the Supreme Court as the first case about
Title VII gender discrimination in 1971, the same year
Reed v. Reed was decided. As noted by
Nina Pillard,
Reed created a basis to analyze sex-based discrimination, "so when we see people concluding in policy or in law that there needs to be a line between the treatment of men and the treatment of women because men are a certain way or women like certain things, or don't like certain things, that's the thing that raises the constitutional red flag under equal protection." A plaque serves as a memorial to the case at the site of Sally Reed's former home (now the location of an Idaho Angler store) at the intersection of S. Vista Ave. and W. Dorian St. in Boise, Idaho. ==See also==