Boden on Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News: Speech and the March for All Civil Rights

Anastasia Boden, George Mason University, has published Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News: Speech and the March for All Civil Rights. Here is the abstract.

To the extent that people know the name Myra Bradwell, they likely know her only for her defeat. In Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court famously denied that Myra had a constitutional right to earn a living as an attorney. 2 According to eight justices, the "paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother," not to enter a profession. 3 Myra may have lost in court, but she was wildly triumphant in the long run and became a successful advocate even without government permission. Though the Court denied her the right to pursue a livelihood, she retained her right to free speech-and she used it to start and manage the most successful legal periodical of her time, to draft and help pass various reforms that advanced equality before the law, and even to free Mary Todd Lincoln from unjust imprisonment in a sanitarium in Illinois. Myra's successful civil rights campaign underscores a perverse distinction in constitutional law: the purported distinction between the right to free speech and other, "unenumerated" constitutional rights like the right to earn a living. The First Amendment is given privileged treatment, with judges subjecting laws that infringe speech to strict judicial scrutiny. 4 Most unenumerated rights, by contrast, are relegated to rational basis scrutiny.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Portrait of a Lady

Patricia Cohen explains how the famous portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, which has hung in the Lincoln Presdential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, for decades, has been determined to be not of Mrs. Lincoln but of an unknown woman. Barry Bauman, the conservator who pieced together the history of the altered portrait, says the man behind it and its story is Lew Bloom, who sold the entire package to Lincoln's graddaughter.  The Lincoln Library will announce the findings on April 26th, the anniversary of the death of John Wilkes Booth.