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In DissentCommentary<br>The dissent that became a statute

ByAnastasia Boden<br>/Jun 15, 2026

(Ian Hutchinson via Unsplash)Near the end of her career, Lilly Ledbetter received an anonymous note: she was being paid far less than every man doing the same job. Ledbetter was one of the first female supervisors at an Alabama Goodyear tire plant, working the 12-hour 7pm to 7am overnight shift for nearly 20 years. A jury later determined that she had been subjected to sex-based discrimination and awarded Ledbetter more than $3 million for violations of the Civil Rights Act, but an appellate court overturned that ruling after finding her claims to have been brought too late. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing one of the dissents that made her the face of dissent in American culture.<br>Most dissents share the same fate. They are born of sharp disagreement, they are issued without fanfare, and then they sit waiting for a new majority to take the bench. Some wait decades and some wait forever. Ginsburg’s dissent in 2007’s Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., however, did something almost without precedent. It inspired Congress to act without hardly having to wait at all.<br>The woman behind the case<br>Lilly Ledbetter had gone to work after she and her decorated veteran husband were struggling to support their two children. Eventually, she wound up at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant in Gadsden, Alabama. She was a supervisor – one of the few women in management at the facility. And despite uneven raises, she received a “Top Performance Award” in 1996. What she didn’t know was that her male counterparts were being paid substantially more, even those with far less seniority. By the end, the male supervisors were being paid between $4,286 at the lowest and $5,236 at the highest per month; Ledbetter was earning only $3,727.<br>Goodyear had a policy prohibiting employees from discussing their pay, so Ledbetter only learned of the disparity after an anonymous note was slipped into her locker. After she brought a pay discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Goodyear moved her to a position lifting heavy tires, which she understood as retaliation. She retired shortly after. Because her retirement benefits were calculated based on her discriminatory pay, as Ledbetter put it, it meant she would be a “second-class citizen for the rest of [her] life.”<br>She sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. A jury found in Ledbetter’s favor and awarded her around $3.5 million in back pay and damages (eventually reduced to $360,000 based on statutory caps).<br>Goodyear appealed on the grounds that Title VII requires a plaintiff to file a charge of discrimination within 180 or 300 days of the unlawful employment practice, depending on the state. Ledbetter argued that every time she received the discriminatory pay, that clock reset, even if the initial discriminatory act of setting that pay had been outside of the 180 days. According to Ledbetter, the paychecks themselves were unlawful because they were a continuing effect of the initial discrimination. An appellate court disagreed, ruling that she could only sue over actual pay decisions that occurred less than 180 days before she filed her initial EEOC complaint. In the court’s view, she could not sue over pay decisions that happened prior to that, even if they affected her pay within that timeframe.<br>Ledbetter appealed to the Supreme Court.<br>A notorious dissent<br>Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Samuel Alito ruled that Ledbetter’s arguments were squarely foreclosed by precedent: the clock started running when the discriminatory act occurs. Because the discriminatory act in her case was a pay-setting decision, and no other intentional discrimination occurred after that, the countdown began when that pay decision was first made – not when Ledbetter received each subsequent paycheck reflecting that decision. After going through the case law, Alito wrote that earlier cases spoke “to the point … directly.” The fact that such cases were in some ways different because they involved denials of promotions or hiring decisions was immaterial. In sum, if the employer made a discriminatory salary decision in 1992, that is when the violation happened – even if its effects echoed through paychecks for the next 15 years.<br>Ginsburg disagreed, and it’s hard to imagine her decision wasn’t informed by her own experience with sex-based discrimination. After graduating tied first in her class at Columbia Law School, Ginsburg had trouble finding a job until a professor threatened to withhold clerkship recommendations unless a district court judge at least agreed to...