SLENDER REED

Besides establishing national legal standards, most landmark Supreme Court decisions settle matters of vital importance to litigants: whether someone lives or dies, the fate of a lost job, who can marry whom. But in Reed v. Reed the stakes were so slight that Justice Harry Blackmun, in the memo he routinely wrote in preparation for hearing oral arguments, called the matter “much ado about nothing.”

Those October 1971 arguments hung on a struggle between Sally and Cecil Reed of Boise, Idaho. The Reeds, who had divorced, disputed who should oversee distribution of a few possessions—including a clarinet, books and LPs, and $495 in a college savings account—their adopted son, Skip, 16, left, the Court overturned millennia of judicial holdings based on assumptions that men and women had inherently different roles in society.