Justice and Legal Change on the Shores of Lake Erie by Finkelman Paul;Alexander Roberta Sue;

Author:Finkelman, Paul;Alexander, Roberta Sue;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

A Shifting Perspective

Just three years after the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Akron, the Northern District once again considered the legality of parental notification. In Akron Center for Reproductive Health v. Rosen, the court considered a 1985 Ohio law that required a minor under the age of eighteen to notify one parent about a planned abortion.69 Unlike the parent notification provision struck down in City of Akron, this law included a judicial bypass exception.

Judge Ann Aldrich was assigned the case and granted both the preliminary and the permanent injunctions invalidating the parental notification law. Considering the facial validity of the law, Aldrich found numerous constitutional defects with the bypass provision, including a lack of anonymity, no expedited process, confusing pleading forms, the clear and convincing standard, and the physician’s duty to notify. Aldrich found that the law had potential for “violations of the constitutional rights of mature minors and minors for whom notification would not be in their best interests.”70 The sponsor of the bill, Representative Jerome Luebbers of Cincinnati, said, “I fully expected that the judge would do this. She’s predictable.”71

Judge Aldrich was predictable because she had distinguished herself as one of the most liberal members of the court, with a strong commitment to social justice. A framed needlepoint slogan hanging on the wall of her chambers read: “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” Standing over six feet tall, Aldrich was a tough woman who had been on her own from the age of eight, when her mother died in a Rhode Island hurricane. She rebuilt railroad lines in Yugoslavia after World War II, raced Siberian huskies, and married a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent as her first husband. She was the only woman in her class at New York University Law School, and she recounted how she was hated by most of her classmates, who thought she was taking space from a worthy veteran and was there just to get a husband. As an attorney and law professor, she focused her efforts on racial justice. She represented the United Church of Christ and sued the Federal Communications Commission to make it easier for minorities to own radio stations in the South. Aldrich arrived in Cleveland in 1968 as the first full-time female law professor at Cleveland-Marshall, where she was later joined by WLF founders Jane Picker and Lizabeth Moody. Women still constituted less than 1 percent of law professors nationwide at the time, even though the first woman had been appointed to a tenure-track position at Berkeley in 1919.72 Aldrich was instrumental in founding the law school’s diversity student recruitment program. She drove to Tupelo, Mississippi, seeking to find qualified future law students at the historically all-black teachers’ colleges of the South. The students, among them the future Ohio appellate judge Patricia Blackmon, often came with nothing, and Professor Aldrich supported them, even inviting them to live in her home.73

Aldrich was the first woman judge in the Northern District, appointed in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.

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