Landmark High Court Opinion Forbids All Sexist Legislation

In a landmark ruling the Supreme Court yesterday unanimously barred arbitrary discrimination against women by legislation.

The Supreme Court ruling brings women's rights under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time. The Court based earlier rulings protecting the rights of blacks on the same amendment.

The decision came in a case from Idaho in which a mother and father each sought the right to administer the estate of their dead son. Under state law, the father had been named administrator.

"We have concluded that the arbitrary preference established in favor of males by the Idaho code cannot stand in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's command that no state can deny thee equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction," Chief Justice Warren Burger said yesterday. He also said that legislatures may treat women differently only when the purpose of such treatment is reasonable.

Melvin Wulf, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed the brief for the Idaho mother. "I am moderately pleased that we won the case, but the pleasure is very qualified because we did not win on broader grounds," he said.

"Our purpose was to try to get the Supreme Court to declare that sexual discrimination is unconstitutional. The Court has apparently declined to make that major step," Wulf said.

Burger announced the ruling shortly before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee approved a substitute for the House passed women's rights amendment.

The substitute amendment prohibits distinctions between the sexes except for those "based on physiological or functional differences."