With a grant from the NHPRC, Princeton University has processed the records of the American Civil Liberties Union (http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC001), one of several major public policy collections at its Mudd Library.

Princeton Alumni Weekly, in an article about the collection, points to the contribution of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

"One towering figure to emerge from the ACLU in the early 1970s was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now on the Supreme Court. After graduating at the top of her class at Columbia Law School but struggling to find work, Ginsburg finally had begun teaching at Rutgers. Her specialty was civil procedure, but some of her students volunteering at the ACLU office in Newark got her interested in a case involving women’s rights. It did not take Ginsburg long to realize she’d found a new specialty: She became the co-founder and first head of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project (1971) and wrote the ACLU’s brief in Reed v. Reed, a 1971 case in which a woman was fighting an Idaho law that made her husband the executor of their son’s estate simply because he was a man."

You can find out more about Ginsburg's role at the ACLU at http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC001.04/c18890