Nadine Taub (January 21, 1943 – June 16, 2020) was an American lawyer who laid the essential groundwork for women's rights in the workplace, including defending and winning the first sexual harassment case in the US in 1977.
Taub played a pivotal, but largely unrecognized, role in the development of sexual harassment law in the United States.
[1] As part of a group of young female lawyers in the 1970s, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, Taub made legal history by winning cases which argued that the Constitution protected women's rights.
[2] As the WRC's director, Taub worked with students on many of the most important cases in her career from establishing sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination to developing ways for battered women to get protection from their attackers.
For example, she fought for the rights of rape victims, women seeking access to abortion, and female employees dealing with discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.
Taub won a case which compelled three private hospitals in New Jersey to open their facilities for women electing to have abortions in 1974.
She also held that, by refusing to permit abortions, they were depriving the plaintiffs and other women, as well as doctors willing to perform the operation, of their constitutional rights to terminate a pregnancy.
The lawsuit states that even if the hospitals are private, they are institutions for public welfare and they cannot refuse to provide medical care, including abortion.
Every aspect of the guidelines must be met and a potential witness can only be held for a few hours while the determinations are made, specifically without being put in a jail cell while they wait.
[5] The suit was brought by the Community Legal Action Workshop of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the Women's Litigation Clinic on behalf of the woman who suffered the police abuse.
[5] Tomkins was a groundbreaking case because the 1977 decision stated that sexual harassment violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protecting women in the workplace.
"[8]In order to eventually win the case, Taub also recruited other feminist lawyers and organizations, such as the Equal Rights Advocates and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which both filed amicus curiae briefs.
"[2][9][10][11][12] Taub worked alongside the future Justice Ruth Bater Ginsberg in taking Califano v. Goldfarb all the way to the Supreme Court and winning in 1977.
The ruling amended the Social Security Act in order to eliminate the burden of proof for widowers and allow female wage earners equal protection.
After a decades long struggle with Langerhans cell histiocytosis, Taub died on June 16, 2020, in her home in Manhattan at 77 years old.