Nadine Taub, born Jan. 21, 1943, in Princeton, was an American lawyer who laid the essential groundwork for women’s rights in the workplace, 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 Ruther Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns, and others, Taub made legal history by winning cases which argued that the Constitution protected women’s rights.
Taub graduated from Yale Law School in 1968, and in 1973 began teaching at Rutgers University. While teaching, she continued to work as an active lawyer and as faculty advisor for the Women’s Rights Law Reporter — the first U.S. legal periodical to focus exclusively on the field of women’s right law — and a member of the New Jersey Task Force on Domestic Violence.
Also in the 1970s, she founded the Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic (WRC) of Rutgers Law School, the first of its kind in the country.
As the WRC director, Taub worked with students on many of the most important cases in her career, from establishing sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, to developing ways for battered women to get protection from their attackers.
In 2017, Rutgers honored her by creating a scholar’s position in her name. Taub died in June 2020.