Attorney Pamela Y. Price Named One of the Nine Most Influential Actors in Title IX History by the national American Civil Liberties Union
In May 2012 in acknowledgment of the 40 year anniversary of the passage of Title IX on June 23, 1972, the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recognized Attorney Pamela Y. Price and the other plaintiffs in the historic Alexander v. Yale case as one of the nine most influential actors in Title IX’s history.
Title IX is the federal law upon which modern women’s sports is built. In the Alexander v. Yale case, Pamela Y. Price and her four co-plaintiffs were the first to use Title IX to establish that sexual harassment at an educational institution is discrimination. Attorney Price was the only Plaintiff of the original seven (7) to survive Yale’s motion to dismiss and proceed to trial in 1979.
Attorney Price was recognized alongside the other “most influential actors in Title IX history,” including Patsy T. Mink, the author of Title IX and the first woman of color and Asian-American ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; Billy Jean King, whose very public and inspiring efforts for women’s rights in sports and society continue to this day; and Bernice R. Sandler, “the Godmother of Title IX,” who was instrumental in establishing the legal groundwork which led up to the law’s passage.
The Alexander v. Yale plaintiffs, students at Yale between 1973 and 1980, set out to change an environment at the university in which sexual harassment of female students was tolerated, and a process for seeking redress was nonexistent. Their stated goal was achieved when Yale established a grievance procedure for sexual harassment claims. Most American universities, high schools and even junior high schools have since adopted grievance procedures.
The Plaintiffs were represented at trial by the Hon. Anne E. Simon, now an Administrative Law Judge with the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco, California. The legal theory which laid the foundation for the case was developed by Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon of the University of Michigan and memorialized in her subsequent groundbreaking treatise, “Sexual Harassment of Working Women” (Yale Press 1979).
