You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Rehnquist's New Approach to Pregnancy Discrimination in "Hibbs"

Siegel offers an appreciation of former US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist's last sex discrimination opinion, Nevada Department of Human Resources v Hibbs. Rehnquist was an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment while serving in the Nixon Justice Department--and, more than any other Nixon appointee, a vocal critic of the Court's sex discrimination jurisprudence in his first decade on the Court. Any reader of these early Rehnquist sex discrimination opinions, or Rehnquist's more recent opinions restricting Congress's power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, surely would not have predicted that he would conclude his time on the bench writing a pathbreaking opinion upholding provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act as a valid exercise of Congress's Section 5 power.