Nadine Taub

After a decades long struggle with Langerhans cell histiocytosis, Taub died on June 16, 2020, in her home in Manhattan at 77 years old.

In 2017, Rutgers honored Taub by creating a scholar's position in her name.

In the spring of 1978, Sally Frank, a sophomore at Princeton, applied for membership to the all-male eating clubs. After being denied twice, she went to the Rutger's clinic for support. Taub took on the case, eventually winning, but it took over ten years. Her argument was based on the relationship between the eating clubs and the university itself, maintaining that they were places of "public accommodation." It was not until the early 1990s that the clubs were court ordered to admit women. Even in the 1980s the clubs were selling shirts featuring a picture of Frank's face, given a mustache and the slogan "Better Dead Than Coed."

Tomkins was a groundbreaking case because the 1977 decision stated that sexual harassment violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protecting women in the workplace. The case was extensively discussed in law reviews and in media at the time. Since then it has continued to be widely cited by the courts. It is significant because "it was the first time public interest organizations officially became involved in a sexual harassment case and the first time explicitly sociological arguments were made in the briefs filed in a sexual harassment case."

Taub worked alongside the future Justice Ruth Bater Ginsberg in taking Califano v. Goldfarb all the way to the Supreme Court and winning in 1977. It ruled that a provision of the Social Security Act, which differentiated between widows and widowers on the basis of gender, was unconstitutional. The ruling amended the Social Security Act in order to eliminate the burden of proof for widowers and allow female wage earners equal protection.

Taub won a case which compelled three private hospitals in New Jersey to open their facilities for women electing to have abortions in 1974. The case went all the way to the State Supreme Court and crucially established the legal basis for abortion practices and policies for both private hospitals and church-supported hospitals, where religious beliefs were previously cited to refuse patients the right to elective abortions.

In 1974, Taub defended a woman who the police jailed after she came to them to report her rape. They kept her as a material witness to her own assault because they believed she was a prostitute. In 1976, Taub won the court order, which was designed to end abuses of the material-witness statute. The Newark Police Department agreed to restrict its use of the statute according to new court-approved guidelines and paid the woman $3,000 in damages. The new guidelines stated that police officers must have probable cause to believe that the witness has important evidence about the crime, that the crime itself was committed, that the witness is unlikely to appear for further proceedings, and the police officer verifies their address. Every aspect of the guidelines must be met and a potential witness can only be held for a few hours while the determinations are made, specifically without being put in a jail cell while they wait.

Taub took on the case in 1974, even before the actual term "sexual harassment" was used (it was later coined in 1975 during the first sexual harassment speak out in Ithaca, New York titled "Speak Out on Sexual Harassment of Women at Work"). The case helped create a foundation for the concept that sexism experienced by women in the workplace is harassment and that women can be legally protected from being victims to it.

After her graduation from Yale, she provided legal services for low-income people in the Bronx. She then went on to work for the ACLU in Newark. After the ACLU, Taub starting teaching at Rutgers Law School in 1973 and continued until her retirement in 2000.

In her defense of the plaintiffs, Taub argued that these three hospitals provided the "only adequate health and maternity care in the area. She also held that, by refusing to permit abortions, they were depriving the plaintiffs and other women, as well as doctors willing to perform the operation, of their constitutional rights to terminate a pregnancy." The refusal was in violation with a state law, which mandated that hospitals provided full heath services. The lawsuit states that even if the hospitals are private, they are institutions for public welfare and they cannot refuse to provide medical care, including abortion. Taub was able to take this case to court and win because of the groundwork laid by landmark case Roe v. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court only the year before in 1973.

Soon after beginning her teaching position at Rutgers, Taub founded the Women's Rights Litigation Clinic (WRC) of Rutgers Law School, the first of its kind in the country. In the 1970s, legal clinics like this one were both a new source of legal representation and a new educational tool, where students were able to work on real cases.

Along with many other feminist lawyers in the 1970s and 80s, Taub made legal history many times over. Nancy Stearn, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who was instrumental in the fight to legalize abortion, remembered the working alongside Taub:

Taub attended Swarthmore College, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1964. She then got her law degree from Yale Law School, graduating with the class of 1968.

Nadine Taub (January 21, 1943 – June 16, 2020) was an American lawyer who laid the essential groundwork for women's rights in the workplace, including defending and winning the first sexual harassment case in the US in 1977. Taub played a pivotal, but largely unrecognized, role in the development of sexual harassment law in the United States. As part of a group of young female lawyers in the 1970s, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, Taub made legal history by winning cases which argued that the Constitution protected women's rights.

Taub was born on January 21, 1943 in Princeton, New Jersey. Her father, Abraham Haskell Taub, a math professor, was teaching at Princeton when she was born. Her mother, Cecilia (Vaslow) Taub was a homemaker.