Hawkin’s favorite quote from Ginsburg is, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
“This quote speaks directly to her legacy with the Colorado Women’s Bar Association,” Hawkins said. “For example, last year we were instrumental in getting the Equal Pay For Equal Work Act passed.”
In 2003, Justice Ginsburg visited Colorado to speak at a CU Law conference event. While in Colorado, Ginsburg agreed to meet with members of the CWBA. The organization put together a reception for Ginsburg and awarded her their highest honor: the Mary Lathrop Trailblazer Award, named after the first female attorney to open a law practice in Colorado.
Ginsburg’s impact on Colorado goes back even further. In 1972, she represented Charles Moritz in Moritz v. Commissioner. Mortiz was a never-married Denver man whose tax deduction for the cost of a caregiver for his mother was denied by the IRS because at the time, only women or formerly married men could receive such a deduction. The gender discrimination case would become, as Newsweek put it, “a legal battle that started Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legacy.”
The case was also one of the main elements of the 2018 legal drama “On the Basis of Sex,” a movie about Ginsburg’s early life and career.
Earlier this week, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser spoke with the Colorado Sun about his time clerking for Ginsburg in the 1990s. “I worked harder than I ever did in my life – including now – and I never felt as much pressure,” he said. Weiser was the last person to argue a case before Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
He also spoke about clerking for Ginsburg during the 1996 landmark case United States v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court ruled the male-only admission policy at Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional.
“To me, she was a shining role model for what was possible as a woman, as a woman in law, as a mother of a young girl,” Hawkins said. “I feel a deep reverence—a very deep sense of respect—for the pioneering work that she did that will continue to inform us for many generations to come.”
