Reed v. Reed

Reed v. Reed,, was an Equal Protection case in the United States in which the Supreme Court ruled that the administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates between sexes.

The case
Sally and Cecil Reed, a married couple who had separated, were in conflict over which of them to designate as administrator of the estate of their adopted son Reed. 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 $1000.

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.

The Supreme Court ruled for the first time in Reed v. Reed that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited differential treatment based on sex.

Because the Idaho Code made a distinction based on sex, the court reasoned that "it thus establishes a classification subject to scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause" and using the generic standard of scrutiny—ordinary or rational basis review—asked "whether a difference in the sex of competing applicants for letters of administration bears a rational relationship to a state objective."

Chief Justice Burger's opinion said: "To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and whatever may be said as to the positive values of avoiding intrafamily controversy, the choice in this context may not lawfully be mandated solely on the basis of sex."

Before the Supreme Court decided the case, Idaho amended its statues to eliminate the mandatory preference for males, effective July 1, 1972.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote the plaintiff's brief, to which she added the names of Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon as co-authors in recognition of her debt to their work.

Those who brought the case had hoped for a broader decision that would have deemed all classifications based on sex "suspect", 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.

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