[From diaries by susanhu w mini-edits.] The Washington Post has an article on prospective SCOTUS Justice John Roberts’ position on women’s rights.
From the article:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women’s rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called “the purported gender gap” and, at one point, questioning “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.”
Further explanation of the context later in the article:
His remark on whether homemakers should become lawyers came in 1985 in reply to a suggestion from Linda Chavez, then the White House’s director of public liaison. Chavez had proposed entering her deputy, Linda Arey, in a contest sponsored by the Clairol shampoo company to honor women who had changed their lives after age 30. Arey had been a schoolteacher who decided to change careers and went to law school. MORE BELOW:
And on women’s pay in the work place
In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were “highly objectionable”; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue — of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of “comparable worth” — was “staggeringly pernicious” and “anti-capitalist.”
The article notes that these documents from the Ronald Regan library are likely to be the last of what we will see on Roberts as the administration has declined to disclose papers from Robert’s time as Justice Department’s deputy solicitor general (from 1989 to 1993).
Related Diary: Why Didn’t Judge Roberts Recluse Himself
