Any publication that devotes itself to promoting liberty, like
this blog, must stop for a moment to take note of the passing of one of the
giants in the never-ending battle for freedom. Connecticut attorney Catherine
Roraback died last week at the age of 87. While she left no survivors other
than a sister who announced her death, she did leave an enormous legacy for
which we all should be grateful.
“Katy,” as she
was known to friends and colleagues, was the brilliant legal strategist behind
the test case Griswold v. Connecticut,
which challenged a Connecticut
statute banning the sale of contraceptives. The Supreme Court heard the case in
1965 and found by a 7-to-2 vote that the antiquated Connecticut law was an unconstitutional
violation of a newly-conceived zone of personal, intimate privacy.
Griswold
v. Connecticut announced
the right of married couples to obtain contraceptives from their physicians.
Roraback represented Estelle Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood
in Connecticut,
as well as Dr. Charles Buxton, the head obstetrician/gynecologist at the Yale
School of Medicine. After years of trying to engineer a strategy for testing a
mid-19th century statute criminalizing both the prescription and use
of contraceptives, Griswold and Buxton, with Katy at their side, engaged in
civil disobedience and opened a birth-control clinic in New Haven – this, in a
heavily Catholic state and at a time when few would have dreamed that the “due process of law” clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment would include such a right.
Katy’s Griswold strategy was brilliant, and
successful, because it used as the opening wedge into the “zone of intimate
privacy” area of the due process clause not only a married couple who wanted to
enjoy sex without procreation, but also a clinic and a reputable physician who
were fighting for the right to treat their patients without the state looking
over their shoulders (or into the bedroom, as the case may be). This successful
strategy was replicated later, through a series of high court opinions that
legalized the prescription of contraceptives for unmarried couples, then the right of a woman to get, and a
physician to give, an abortion, and, then, the
right of same-sex couples to engage in intimate relations without the storm
troopers bursting into the bedroom. As
we in Massachusetts
know, all of this groundwork led the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to
declare same-sex marriage a constitutional right under the nation’s oldest
state constitution.
We can
trace all of these rights in large measure to the brilliance, persistence and
courage of this remarkable lawyer, who graduated from Mount
Holyoke College
in 1941 and was the only woman in her Class of 1948 at the Yale Law
School. Katy was a mentor as well
to younger lawyers, particularly women trial lawyers who had a hard time
breaking into certain legal fields traditionally closed to women, most notably criminal
defense, civil liberties, and civil rights. Tough as nails, Katy represented
not only establishment types like the head of obstetrics at Yale, but also the
head of the radical Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale, tried in 1971 for the
murder of another party member suspected of disloyalty (resulting in a
mistrial).
Katy
Roraback will be deeply missed by many, but her legacy is constantly with us to
remind us of what a single brilliant, courageous and persistent person can
accomplish in a single lifetime.