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43 Harbinger [i] (2018-2019)

handle is hein.journals/harbg43 and id is 1 raw text is: TRIBUTE TO LENORA LAPIDUS On May 5, 2019, contributor Lenora Lapidus passed away after a long fight with breast cancer. As director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Lapidus dedicated her career to fighting for gender equality. She pursued an expansive vision of civil rights for women of all ages and backgrounds. Her work challenged educational inequity, economic injustice, gender-based violence, and mistreatment of women in the criminal justice system. In recognition of her decades of advocacy for women's rights, we dedicate this special symposium issue of The Harbinger to Lapidus and include the following tributes in her honor. The issue includes an article by Lapidus on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early career, the final line of which applies equally to the author herself: We are deeply indebted to her for her work laying the bedrock for gender equality, and we are proud to follow in her footsteps to expand upon this foundation. FROM THE ACLU WOMEN'S RIGHTS PROJECT Lenora M. Lapidus, who for nearly two decades led the women's rights program at the American Civil Liberties Union once helmed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died on May 5, 2019, of cancer. She was 55. Ms. Lapidus's career as an advocate for women and girls spanned three decades, most of it spent with the ACLU. It began in the summer of 1988, when Ms. Lapidus was a law student intern with the organization's Women's Rights Project (WRP). Co-founded in 1971 by now-Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, WRP had won numerous landmark Supreme Court rulings throughout the 1970s that established women's rights under the U.S. Constitution. Twelve years after her internship, in 2001, Ms. Lapidus returned to WRP as its Director, having already served as the top lawyer with the ACLU's New Jersey affiliate. By the time Ms. Lapidus took over, WRP had ceased active litigation, but she revived it and grew it to nearly a dozen staff members, pursuing an ambitious litigation and policy agenda targeting a broad range of economic and social justice issues that yielded victories in the Supreme Court, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and countless federal, state, and local courts and legislatures. At the ACLU, we are fond of saying that Lenora Lapidus renovated the house that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg built. Early in her tenure, Ms. Lapidus saw the potential of using an international human rights approach to address gender-based violence. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the civil rights claim brought by Jessica Gonzales against Colorado police for failing to intervene when her estranged husband abducted her three children, who later were killed. Ms. Lapidus and WRP took up Ms. Gonzales's cause before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), a body charged with protecting human rights throughout the western hemisphere. In 2011, after six years of litigation, WRP won a decision from the IACHR recognizing, for the first time, that failure by the police and federal courts to protect victims of domestic violence is a human rights violation. Although the U.S. refused to recognize the IACHR ruling on technical grounds, Ms. Lapidus and her WRP team used the

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