SPOTLIGHT

Student Receives Encouraging ‘Report Card’ from Supreme Court

Every year, law students across the country labor long and hard to develop a novel topic for their law review "comments" or "notes." As they write these articles, which meticulously examine a single point of law or legal issue, students often wonder, "Am I getting this right?" Amy Walsh, a third-year student at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, doesn’t need to wonder—a Supreme Court justice told her so.

Walsh published her comment, "Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Extending the Constitution," in the fall 1998 issue of the John Marshall Law Review. The article addressed Ginsburg’s influence on the gradual extension of constitutional protection of women’s rights. Interested in labor and employment law, Walsh examined the career of Ginsburg, a pioneer in the jurisprudence of gender discrimination and the author of United States v. Virginia, the 1996 Supreme Court decision that forced the Virginia Military Institute to open its doors to women.

"I looked at Justice Ginsburg’s efforts as an attorney back in the 1970s, when she started working on cases to raise the level of scrutiny in the area of gender bias," Walsh says. "When you look at her decisions since joining the Supreme Court—particularly United States v. Virginia—you find that Justice Ginsburg is still motivated by those same ideas."

Satisfied with her success in publishing her law review comment, Walsh, who is ranked first in her class, turned her attention to other matters—until she returned home from an out-of-town weekend trip last March to find an envelope in her mail marked "United States Supreme Court."

"I thought the worst," Walsh said. "I figured that [Ginsburg] was writing to tell me to be more careful before I go saying what other people think."

The letter was nothing of the sort. The justice had written to congratulate Walsh for her perceptive analysis. Apparently, Ginsburg first took note of the article after a friend who sits on the Canadian Supreme Court sang its praises.

"Cheers on a job extremely well done," Ginsburg wrote. "The care with which you examined the briefs, decisions and articles on the 1970s progression, and the VMI controversy, lifted my spirits."

"I was just so honored," Walsh said of the praise she received, though perhaps those around her were not surprised. After all, the out-of-town trip from which she had just come home was to the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she and a classmate had just taken first prize in the Evan A. Evans Moot Court Competition—arguing an issue of constitutional law.

Walsh had not given much thought to a judicial clerkship prior to the letter. She had planned to go to work for a firm in the Chicago area as soon as she graduates in January, while her husband completes his MBA at Northwestern University. Though it may have to wait for a bit, the letter awakened her interest in a clerkship someday. "I would definitely like to look into clerking—maybe at the circuit level," Walsh says.

More important, however, Ginsburg’s words inspired anew Walsh’s passion for labor and employment law—and gender discrimination issues in particular. "It completely motivated me," she says. "I was moving away from that area of law in my mind, but the letter gave me a burst of energy and made me want to move forward . . . like trying to take on the types of cases [Ginsburg] did when she was an attorney." •

Brandon Bigelow

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