• A Florida judge refused to block the prosecution in Casey Anthony's murder trial from seeing the death penalty. Lawyers for Anthony, who is accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, claimed that the state seeking the death penalty violated her constitutional rights. The judge said whether or not Anthony should face the death penalty is a decision for the jury to make. • Banita Jacks, who was found in her Washington, D.C. home last year with her four daughters' decomposing bodies, was sentenced to 120 years in prison today for murdering the girls. The judge rejected the defense's suggestion that the four 30 year sentences be served concurrently, and their claim that she's wasn't competent when she rejected their advice to plead insanity. • Two British boys have been charged with the rape of an 8-year-old girl. At 10 years old, they are the youngest children to be charged with rape in the history of England. The assault occurred at a park, where the three children had gone to play on the jungle gym. The boys have been released on bail, and will return to court on January 2nd. • Members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights voted today to subpoena data from 19 colleges to investigate whether some schools favor men in their admission process. The probe is based on news reports and anecdotal evidence that colleges discriminate against women to maintain an even gender balance. A mix of schools near D.C. were chosen as a sample of U.S. colleges, not because they're specifically suspected of discrimination. •  A new book, The Death of American Virtue, reveals that Monika Lewinsky believes Bill Clinton lied to a federal jury about their affair. The author quotes a letter from Lewinsky, which reads: "There was no leeway on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully." •  According to a new study from Canada, 10 to 15% of women have maladaptive eating behaviors. However, out of the 1,500 women interviewed, not one had anorexia, and the most common disordered behavior was binge eating. 2.5% also admitted to using laxatives, diuretics or vomiting to purge. • The Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected a motion from Marion Jones' relay teammates at the 2000 Olympics to overturn the International Olympic Committee's decision to strip them of their gold medals after Jones admitted to doping. The ruling was a setback, but the court will hold a full hearing on the case next year. •  Billie Piper, the actress who played Belle in the TV series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl and Dr. Brooke Magnanti, the woman behind the Belle du Jour blog and book, will meet in person on a television documentary, Billie and the Call Girl Bare All. It will be "the last world on what it was like to be Belle - how my sexuality was formed, how I came to the work and what it's like to be portrayed on TV," said Dr. Magnanti. •

We have no idea if we can get riders, or what they will cost.

Abortion-rights activists say the option of buying additional coverage for abortion - a so-called rider - is a false promise. They cite the examples of Oklahoma and North Dakota, where riders have had negligible use even though allowed under state laws that otherwise ban insurance coverage of elective abortions.

"Abortion coverage should be part of the regular package," Crane said. "Women don't expect unplanned pregnancies and don't expect their wanted pregnancies to go wrong. ... They don't anticipate needing abortion coverage so they wouldn't buy a rider."

Kristin Binns of WellPoint, Inc., which oversees health plans serving 35 million Americans, said it's impossible for the insurance industry at this stage to estimate how much such riders would cost and the extent to which they might be offered.

"We don't have a clue," she said.

The Republicans' crap-ass plan still covers abortion...by accident.

The Republican National Committee's health insurance plan covers elective abortion – a procedure the party's own platform calls "a fundamental assault on innocent human life."

Federal Election Commission Records show the RNC purchases its insurance from Cigna. Two sales agents for the company said that the RNC's policy covers elective abortion.

Informed of the coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho told POLITICO that the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

"The current policy has been in effect since 1991, and we are taking steps to address the issue," Gitcho said.

While many women do opt to pay cash for their abortions, that is not the end of the story.

Stupak says one reason his amendment's impact would be limited is because only a small fraction of abortions - 13 percent by Guttmacher Institute estimates - are paid for directly by private insurance. The vast majority are paid for in cash, even by women with abortion coverage who do so out of privacy concerns.

However, Dr. Willie Parker, an abortion provider in Washington, D.C., noted that insurance coverage could be vital for women with health problems who need hospital abortions costing many thousands of dollars, compared to roughly $400 to $800 for a first-trimester abortion in a clinic.

"The cash option was a challenge for many women even in more reasonable economic times," Parker said. "I see that becoming worse as people have to make hard decisions because abortion is not considered part of health care."

There are issues trying to play to both sides.

Other lawmakers said, in effect, that they voted for the Stupak amendment but didn't really mean it, because they expected the amendment to be stripped out later, either in the Senate or in a conference committee.

As a result, Democratic leaders are in some danger of having the worst of both worlds: letting a compromise pass, thereby angering their liberal wing, while appearing cynical in suggesting that they now intend to drive it out of the bill, thereby angering the party's moderates and the bishops. That's a problem with consequences: The simple math in the House suggests the health bill wouldn't have passed without the votes of the moderates who came to the "yes" side after the Stupak amendment.

If we become apathetic about our right to choose, we will lose that right.

The pro-choice, pro-health reform advocates I spoke with this week remained confident that they would be able to nudge Congress to soften the Stupak-Pitts restraints in a final health care reform compromise. They took heart from the fact that a vigorous public insurance option - an idea pronounced a dead letter not so many months ago - did at last make it into the House's legislation. But there's one key difference: the American public widely supported the public option, polls showed this fall. The support for abortion rights now isn't so solid.

A Pew Research Center survey released last month showed Americans' support for abortion rights is at a striking low - down to 47 percent - after hovering consistently just above 50 percent since at least the mid-1990s. And despite the passionate outrage expressed by high-profile abortion rights supporters this week, most of the pro-choice public just doesn't appear to be all that fired up about fighting for the freedom to choose anymore. According to the Pew poll, only 15 percent of people overall say abortion is a "critical" issue today, and even among those described as liberal Democrats, that proportion has dropped 26 points, from 34 percent to 8 percent, since 2006.

Stupak-Pitts passed not just because a group of Catholic bishops bore down on Democratic lawmakers. It passed because it could.

Tough choices for women on abortion coverage [MSNBC]
RNC insurance plan covers abortion [Politico]
Abortion Upends Health-Bill Alliance [WSJ]
‘Mad Men,' Maddening Times [NY Times]

Adfreak, in its coverage of the campaign, writes:

The NWLC says 25-year-old women have been charged as much as 84 percent more than their male counterparts for health plans that don't even offer maternity coverage … all things I honestly didn't know until I saw the ad. With the mild uproar over last week's suggestion by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz., moron) that as a man he shouldn't have to pay for a plan that covers maternity care, NWLC's little campaign is getting extra press-and will no doubt spawn more campaigns as other women's non-profits rally around the call. And around Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who pointed out to Senator Kyl that while he may not need maternity insurance now, his mom probably did.

The following Oh Snap attack is brought to you by Senator Debbie Stabenow:

If you want to tell off Senator Jon Kyl (or just email your senator reminding them how much you support the public option, or if you want to encourage Olympia Snowe not to filibuster and to stop holding up the process with this ridiculous trigger idea, or if you want to tell Nancy Pelosi to keep hope alive), you can use this cool little form to do so.

Official Site [A Woman Is Not a Pre-Existing Condition]
New ads turn healthcare into a gender issue [AdFreak]
Snowe Also Says ... [TPM Editors Blog]
Snowe Says She Won't Back Any Immediate Public Option (Update1) [Bloomberg]
Exclusive: Nancy Pelosi lacks votes for most sweeping public option [Politico]

Obama has a major stake in making it work - his approval rating has sunk fifteen points among Democrats while the support for the public option continues to climb. However, one of the major problems facing lawmakers is the definition of a public option. Exactly what does a public option accomplish, who will benefit from it, who will be eligible, and who will oversee the plan? Today's Washington Post does its best to make sense of the madness:

Overall, 45 percent of Americans favor the broad outlines of the proposals now moving in Congress, while 48 percent are opposed, about the same division that existed in August, at the height of angry town hall meetings over health-care reform. Seven in 10 Democrats back the plan, while almost nine in 10 Republicans oppose it. Independents divide 52 percent against, 42 percent in favor of the legislation. [...]

There are also deep splits in the new poll over whether the proposed changes would go too far or not far enough in expanding coverage and controlling costs. Twice as many see the plan as leaning toward too much government involvement, but since last month there has been a nine-point increase in the number who say government should be more involved. [...]

If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.

Fifty-six percent of those polled back a provision mandating that all Americans buy insurance, either through their employers or on their own or through Medicare or Medicaid. That number rises to 71 percent if the government were to provide subsidies for many lower-income Americans to help them buy coverage. With those qualifiers, a majority of Republicans say they support the mandate.

And there's still the little matter of how to pay for all of this. There is a lot of opposition to the plans on the table for a deficit-neutral bill, but perhaps Congress should re-evaluate their stance on not adding to the national debt:

Nearly seven in 10 say they think that any health-care measure would increase the federal budget deficit, a possible concern for Obama. But nearly half of those who see the legislation as growing the deficit also say the increase would be "worth it."

Improving access to insurance would be a major coup for women, who are disproportionately impacted by prejudicial policies and out of control premiums. Luckily, some of us are mad as hell and we aren't gonna take it any more. Newsweek, in a report called "The Cost of Being a Woman" explains:

At a recent Capitol Hill press conference on women and health care reform, Sen. Barbara Mikulski started things off with rallying cry: "Equal insurance for equal premiums!" Four female senators spent the event discussing disparities women face in the individual health-care market, where eight states and D.C. consider domestic abuse a preexisting condition and maternity coverage is often lacking. Chief among concerns about health-care discrimination is gender rating, the health-insurance practice of charging different premiums based on gender. Mikulski reiterated the point on Larry King last Thursday: "Just like we didn't get equal pay for equal work, we haven't got equal insurance benefits for equal insurance premiums." [...]

The issue came to head last year when the National Women's Law Center published a report finding widespread variation in gender pricing, with women charged inconsistently high rates, depending on company and state of residence. A 25-year-old woman, for example, could be charged anywhere from 6 to 45 percent more than a 25-year-old man. "The huge variations in premiums charged to women and men for identical health plans highlight the arbitrariness of gender rating," the report concluded. (It's difficult to tell how arbitrary gender rating is, since insurance companies do not publicize their costs, although there is at least some research finding women cost more to insure then men). Twelve states either limit the use of gender rating or bar the practice outright; others have considered similar methods. Legislators and activists taking up the cause have termed the disparities "gender discrimination."

Proponents of gender rating argue that if you eliminate gender rating (or pricing on any other risk factor, for that matter) and you run the risk of "adverse selection": men, who feel they're paying too much relative to the few benefits they receive, opting out of the system. As the pool becomes more female heavy, men increasingly pull out, to the point that insurance companies no longer have an interest in the market. This played out in Kentucky in the mid-1990s. In 1994, rates for young women were 150 percent that of those for young men. So that year the state passed legislation limiting insurance companies in their ability to charge different premiums based on things like race and gender. Over the next 10 years they saw low-risk individuals-the guys who thought they were overcharged-simply opting out altogether. Then the insurance companies fled, too, about 40 had left the market by 1998. So that year Kentucky largely repealed the program. The insurance companies returned to the state shortly afterward.As the Kentucky experience shows (and similar experiences in other states also demonstrate) small changes in regulation can ripple through a market to have a serious, and not necessarily favorable, impact.

But by no means is Kentucky the rule. Montana, for example, successfully outlawed gender rating in 1993 and never looked back. A dozen states are now managing similar bans or restrictions. And even if some adverse selection does occur, advocates of gender-neutral policies say that's OK-there are larger, philosophical issues at stake. The NWLC report describes how advocates for the Montana and Minnesota bans argued that "society considers gender discrimination to be just as repugnant as racial discrimination," and therefore should drop gender rating, just as they did for race in the 1950s and 1960s.

The whole report is well worth a read.

Not surprisingly, despite the changing tone and direction of the country, the GOP is still hating on progress:

But even now, as the odds grow that President Barack Obama will have a chance to sign a health reform bill, Republicans say they're content to stick by that strategy - believing they can define the Democratic plan as a bad mix of higher premiums, more taxes and cuts to Medicare.

And that, they believe, is a winning formula for them in 2010.

"If they pass this bill, I wouldn't want to be a Democrat standing for reelection in 2010," said Arizona Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.).

Added Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.): "Several dozen House Democrats risk losing their jobs if they vote for reform."

But the Republican strategy also carries clear risks - already opening up the GOP to criticism as the "party of no" from the White House and congressional Democrats. And it lays down the contours of the midterm races in sharp relief, helping to turn them into a referendum on Obama and his ambitious agenda on health reform and other issues.

To be quite frank, becoming the party of "no" may be the least of the GOP's worries. It's already in the running for "party of fools," "party of bigots," or "the angry white man's last stand." And opposing the public option is just one more nail in the coffin.

WaPo-ABC Poll: Clear Majority Favors A Public Option [Politico]
Approval Of Obama Drops Sharply Among Dems As Support For Public Option Rises [The Plum Line]
Public Option Gains Support [Washington Post]
The Cost Of Being A Woman [Newsweek]
GOP: Reform Is Bad Politics [Politico]

• After being passed over for a promotion at McDonald's because of her pregnancy, Rhonda Floyd started a support group of sorts to benefit women in the hospitality industry. "McDonald's is very male-dominated," she said, as are many businesses in the leisure and hospitality sector. • British cops recently caught three woman and a man who were trying to pimp six girls aged 14-23 at a West London hotel. They were also offering a 12-year-old virgin for up to £50,000. All four have been arrested and are facing criminal charges. • According to Nicola Pease, the very same laws designed to protect women in the workplace are actually holding us back. Pease says there is no more sexism in the finance sector, except that which the ladies bring upon themselves by having babies and demanding maternity leave and other unreasonable things. • Author and women's activist Malalai Joya on Obama: "He must criticize how the United States helped turn Afghanistan into a safe haven for fundamentalist terrorists and now helps prop up a corrupt regime and a powerful drug mafia... If I ever do have the chance to meet President Obama, I will try to convey to him these points and tell him very clearly that U.S governments have betrayed the Afghan people enough." • Ximena Hartstock is the acting director of D.C.'s Department of Parks and Recreation, but she may be forced out because of her race and gender. She claims that at a recent city council meeting, Councilmember Marion Barry raised questions as to whether Hartstock could relate to African Americans or if she could do the job as well as a man. •  Kim Ng may become the first female General Manager in baseball. She was spotted having lunch with Padres owner Jeff Moorad, and has previously interviewed for GM positions with the Dodgers and the Mariners. •  As part of a charity event a group of men from New York state put on some pumps and walked a mile in women's shoes. The money raised by the walk has been donated to Alternatives for Battered Women, which operates a shelter for victims of domestic violence. •  A television show/internet competition that has been described as a "cross between Sports Illustrated and Next Top Model" has come under attack from feminists, who think the bathing suit-based contest is sexist. • Researchers have found that new mothers spend 20% more time awake than they did before giving birth. The resulting "postnatal insomnia" can often lead to depression and anxiety problems for stressed parents. Doctors advise that women suffering from postnatal insomnia seek help as soon as possible. • Quinceañeras — lavish parties given by Latino families to celebrate a girl's 15th birthday and transition into womanhood — are gaining popularity in America. Michele Salcedo, author of a book on the practice, says, "It's a way to push back a lot of the negativity that a lot of Latinos feel is directed at Latinos. It is a way for people who have recently arrived, or maybe not so recently arrived, to say 'I have done well here.'" • In a speech at Morehead State University, author bell hooks said, "God is a feminist because if we accept that God is a god of love then we know that God fully intends for females and males to be self-actualized, self-empowered and full of self esteem." • Just one of many problems for working moms is the fact that many of them continue to see child care as coming out of their paycheck alone, not their family's overall income. Nora Bredes, director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership, says, "Our belief as a society is that mothers are responsible for the care of children, not the couple. We give lip service on how it's a family priority, but it really is all on her." • Québec's fashion industry has adopted a charter to help promote healthy body image, including resolutions to "encourage healthy eating and weight-control habits" and "discourage excessive weight-control practices or appearance modification." • The success of New York police and prosecutors in using DNA to catch rapists in cold cases has lead to a greater push to use DNA evidence in the investigation of other crimes. "It is a tremendously powerful tool that allows us to protect the rights of victims," said California District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. • 

Bazelon's interview — which reads more like a fascinating conversation than a boring profile or Q&A — jumps all over the map from Roe v. Wade to Sonia Sotomayor and what women bring to the court, the bench and public discourse. She's also really stoked about the number of women on the Canadian Supreme Court (where the Chief Justice is also a woman), but blames the difference, too kindly, on the low attrition rate on the American one and not on the fact that dudes keep getting replaced with dudes.

Bazelon asks Ginsburg about the two main criticisms leveled at Sotomayor: her supposed abrasiveness on the bench; and the "wise Latina" comment. Ginsburg dismisses the latter as a combination of imperfect speech and an acknowledgment that judges do bring their own experiences to the table. On the former, though, she's got a story of her own.

Once Justice O'Connor was questioning counsel at oral argument. I thought she was done, so I asked a question, and Sandra said: Just a minute, I'm not finished. So I apologized to her and she said, It's O.K., Ruth. The guys do it to each other all the time, they step on each other's questions. And then there appeared an item in USA Today, and the headline was something like"Rude Ruth Interrupts Sandra."

Just the thought of someone calling her "rude" is kind of upsettingly hilarious, but it also does point to the way sexism manifests itself in terms of how women are expected to behave.

Ginsburg also takes on the idea that Sotomayor, as a beneficiary of affirmative action, is thus unqualified for the bench (and provides an interesting history lesson about affirmative action).

Q: What do you think about Judge Sotomayor's frank remarks that she is a product of affirmative action?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: So am I. I was the first tenured woman at Columbia. That was 1972, every law school was looking for its woman. Why? Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was enforcing the Nixon government contract program. Every university had a contract, and Stan Pottinger would go around and ask, How are you doing on your affirmative-action plan? William McGill, who was then the president of Columbia, was asked by a reporter: How is Columbia doing with its affirmative action? He said, It's no mistake that the two most recent appointments to the law school are a woman and an African-American man.

Q: And was that you?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: I was the woman. I never would have gotten that invitation from Columbia without the push from the Nixon administration. I understand that there is a thought that people will point to the affirmative-action baby and say she couldn't have made it if she were judged solely on the merits. But when I got to Columbia I was well regarded by my colleagues even though they certainly disagreed with many of the positions that I was taking.

How many Republican Congressmen do you think know that Ginsburg got where she did because of the efforts of the Nixon Administration to force universities to implement affirmative action?

One thing Ginsburg is somewhat less enthusiastic about than Sotomayor is the idea of women's-only associations and groups.

I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women's organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man's world. If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both all-female networking groups and, more implicitly, to same-sex education.

She's also fairly resistant to the idea that women inherently judge differently than men and encourage all men to judge differently, which tends to be code for "more liberally."

I'm very doubtful about those kinds of [results]. I certainly know that there are women in federal courts with whom I disagree just as strongly as I disagree with any man. I guess I have some resistance to that kind of survey because it's what I was arguing against in the '70s. Like in Mozart's opera "Così Fan Tutte": that's the way women are.

The idea that women are generally more liberal or empathetic than men and encourage men to be so does seem relatively rooted in gendered stereotypes that are harmful to women's progress.

An interesting thing that comes up in the discussion of the recent ruling in favor of the reverse-discrimination case among firefighters in New Haven is Ginsburg's assertion that unions have been the source of a great deal of gender discrimination.

I don't know how many cases there were, Title VII civil rights cases, where unions were responsible. The very first week that I was at Columbia, Jan Goodman, a lawyer in New York, called me and said, Do you know that Columbia has given layoff notices to 25 maids and not a single janitor? Columbia's defense was the union contract, which was set up so that every maid would have to go before the newly hired janitor would get a layoff notice.

By the way, the AFL-CIO is poised to elect Elizabeth Shuler treasurer-secretary — which would make her the highest ranking woman in its history. One assumes that having more women in leadership roles in unions could make a difference in men's ability to collectively bargain away women's jobs.

And, of course, Bazelon and Ginsburg get into abortion rights, which Bazelon argues — and Ginsburg agrees — may eventually become rooted in constitutional law about equal rights rather than the right to privacy. Ginsburg also thinks it's becoming more and more of an issue of economic discrimination.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don't know why this hasn't been said more often.

She's also not keen on abortion restrictions, like waiting periods, that pass the Court's "undue burden" test even when they are.

In the interview, which lasted 90 minutes, Ginsburg comes across as sharp, funny and completely as awesome of you'd hope she'd be. More, please?

The Place of Women on the Court [New York Times]

Related: Woman to Seek High Labor Post [New York Times]

According to the New York Times, she first tackled the "problem" — cited by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearing — that some justices use rulings from foreign judges when writing opinions. Reports the Times:

Justice Ginsburg said the controversy was based on the misunderstanding that citing a foreign precedent means the court considers itself bound by foreign law as opposed to merely being influenced by such power as its reasoning holds.

"Why shouldn't we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?" she asked.

Apparently, someone forgot to tell her that America is the repository of all wisdom ever.

She also spoke about why it is that it's only in the last 50 years that many other countries instituted judiciaries that have the power to strike down legislation that makes it though the Democratic process.

"What happened in Europe was the Holocaust," she said, "and people came to see that popularly elected representatives could not always be trusted to preserve the system's most basic values."

Values, like, say, not torturing people and the importance of judicial process? It's a good warning that sometimes elected officials might use the legislative process to subvert that, I mean, we wouldn't want that to happen here.

She covered that, too:

"The police think that a suspect they have apprehended knows where and when a bomb is going to go off," she said, describing the question presented in the case. "Can the police use torture to extract that information? And in an eloquent decision by Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel, the court said: ‘Torture? Never.' "

The message of the decision, Justice Ginsburg said, was "that we could hand our enemies no greater victory than to come to look like that enemy in our disregard for human dignity." Then she asked, "Now why should I not read that opinion and be affected by its tremendous persuasive value?"

"Because you're an American," is probably the answer to that.

Ginsburg also discussed her role in creating the term "gender discrimination," which is a forehead-slapper if I ever heard one.

She helped introduce the term "gender discrimination" as a synonym for "sex discrimination," she said, explaining that her secretary had proposed the idea while typing a brief to be submitted to male judges.

" ‘The first association of those men with the word "sex" is not what you're talking about,' " the secretary said, Justice Ginsburg recalled. " ‘Why don't you use a grammar-book term? Use gender. It has a neutral sound, and it will ward off distracting associations.' "

The Washington Post pointed out that is was in one of the most famous gender discrimination cases of late — the Lilly Ledbetter pay discrimination case — that Ginsburg threw up what she terms "a red flag."

Ginsburg, unlike some of her colleagues, often makes her case in public speeches. And, when she thinks her colleagues have misinterpreted a statute, she writes a dissent that on Friday she called a "red flag," essentially asking Congress to take action.

Her dissent in the court's 2007 decision that threw out an Alabama tire company manager's suit alleging discriminatory pay made Lilly Ledbetter a heroine on the left and led Congress to change the law, presenting Obama with his first major bill to sign.

In other words, she doesn't hide behind her robes.

Of course, she had trouble hiding behind her robes just a little bit.

"Now, there I am all alone, and it doesn't look right," Ginsburg said. She said she watches the number of women at each session of the Supreme Court bar, notices that four of the nine members of Canada's Supreme Court are women, including the chief justice, and sees the female reporters who cover the court.

"It's lonely for me. Not that I don't love all my colleagues. I do," Ginsburg said.

I guess we need just a little thought about gender discrimination on the court in addition to at the court.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate, thinks we need both.

But in an award-winning 2008 paper titled "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging," Washington University's Christina L. Boyd and Andrew D. Martin and Northwestern School of Law's Lee Epstein suggest that women judges really are different. Surveying sex discrimination suits resolved by panels of judges in federal circuit courts between 1995 and 2002, the researchers examined whether male and female judges decide cases differently, and went on to look at whether the presence of a female on a panel of judges affects the behavior of her male colleagues.

Here's what they found: The male judges were 10 percent more likely to rule against alleged sex-discrimination victims. And male judges were "significantly more likely" to rule in their favor if a woman judge served on their panel.

And, Lithwick points out, it's not just conservatives, either.

History proves that you can be the most empathetic, open-minded, and sensitive jurist in all the world-and still be a complete dolt about gender. It's why liberal lion William Brennan could write so expansively about equality and fairness and justice while still refusing to hire female law clerks. It's why Ginsburg was denied a clerkship with the legendary judge Learned Hand. (He refused to hire her because he liked to use salty language.)

Oh, fuck that noise.

Lithwick finally points out that, if and when Obama does have an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice, he'll have plenty of women to choose from.

When it comes time for Obama to appoint a new justice, he'll have an embarrassment of female talent to choose from: To name just a very few, potential candidates include appeals court judges like Diane Wood, Sonia Sotomayor, Kim McLane Wardlaw; his new solicitor general, Elena Kagan; gifted academics such as Stanford Law School's Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan; Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm; and private attorneys like Teresa Wynn Roseborough.

An embarrassment, that is, because Ginsburg is currently the sole woman on the Court despite that kind of legal talent on both sides of the aisle.

Ginsburg Shares Views On Influence Of Foreign Law On Her Court, And Vice Versa [NY Times]
Ginsburg Gives No Hint Of Giving Up The Bench [Washington Post]
The Fairer Sex [Slate]

The girl, who is not identified due to her age, decided to fight back, suing the school with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, on the grounds that the school's restrictive dress code was a case of gender discrimination and a denial of the girl's right to free speech. At first, the school attempted to placate the girl by discussing pantsuit options, but that was soon dismissed, as school officials reversed their dress code standards just four days after the suit was filed, releasing this statement: "School policy for this year's prom will be that all attendees shall wear appropriate formal attire with no gender-based attire requirements imposed. Female students will be permitted to wear tuxedos if they choose."

Girl Sues After School Says She Can't Wear Tux To Prom [TheIndyChannel]
School: Girl Will Be Able To Wear Tux To Prom [TheIndyChannel]