On the Basis of Sex

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a first-year student at Harvard Law School. When her husband Martin, a second-year student, falls ill with cancer, she attends both her classes and his, taking notes and transcribing lectures while caring for Martin and their infant daughter Jane. Two years later Martin, his cancer in remission, is hired by a firm in New York. Ruth petitions Harvard Law School Dean Griswold to allow her to finish her Harvard law degree with classes at Columbia Law School in New York, but he insists on following Harvard University policies at the time and denies her request, so she transfers to Columbia. In spite of graduating at the top of her class, she is unable to find a position with a law firm because none of the firms she applies to want to hire a woman. She takes a job as a professor at Rutgers Law School, teaching "Sex Discrimination and the Law".