W ho would have ever thought that a book on legal trials for women's rights would be so fascinating to read? The authors of this book have presented a wide variety of trials in such easy-to-read, engaging language that one hesitates to put the book down.

The famous trials, such as Roe v. Wade and the Baby M trial, are of course included. But so are other important but less well-known trials.

Reed v. Reed (1971) was the first case in which the Supreme Court agreed that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution did protect women's rights. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, said that no state could deny any citizen the equal protection of the law. Since then, women had been trying to use the 14th Amendment to win equal rights, including the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony, in 1872, used the amendment to persuade registrars to let her and 14 other women register and vote. However, when she was arrested and tried, the judge did not buy the argument and sentenced her to a fine of $100. It was not until Reed v. Reed that the Supreme Court agreed that states cannot make laws that discriminate against women unless they were rationally related to a legitimate government interest. This case overturned an Idaho law that automatically preferred male relatives over female relatives in administering the estate of someone who died without a will.

Craig v. Boren (1976) was a seemingly trivial case: a liquor seller challenged the law that allowed her to sell beer to 18-year-old women, but prohibited men from buying beer until they were 21. But this case resulted in the Supreme Court announcing stronger protections against sex discrimination in general. The case involved an Oklahoma law, and the state argued that they could legally discriminate on the basis of gender because it served a legitimate government objective: young men caused more traffic accidents than women, so a higher legal age for men served to prevent traffic accidents. But the court ruled that sex-discriminatory laws could stand only if they bore a substantial interest to an important government objective -- and not just a rational relationship to a legitimate government interest. Therefore the court overturned the Oklahoma law and created a new, stronger standard to evaluate sex discrimination claims.

Other cases covered include Margaret Sanger's trial (1918) for distributing birth control, which made it legal for doctors to advise married patients about birth control; Pittsburgh Press v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations (1973), in which the Supreme Court ruled, nine years after the passage of Title VII made sex discrimination in employment illegal, that newspapers cannot publish sex-segregated want ads; and Oregon v. Rideout (1978), the first trial in which a man was accused of raping his wife. -- Jyotsna Sreenivasan