Change is inevitable. However, to effect change, a Catalyst is indispensable.

The main character in the story was a female lawyer, who as a student has been discriminated upon by
her peers and mentors based on her gender, and even after becoming a lawyer, such discrimination did
not cease- she failed to land a job in firms of her choosing, despite her great academic achievements
and legal prowess, just because she is of the female gender. And so she decided to give teaching a
chance. As a professor of Law she made it her goal to inculcate into the minds of her students that
discrimination should never be the norm. That even though we see and experience discrimination on a
daily basis; and that even laws and jurisprudence makes it legal, said practice is not something that
should be ignored or tolerated.

In the years that she has been working in the academe, she finally came to the realization that her
dream to be given a day in court is becoming narrower as the days pass by. However as she finally able
to let go, a case was given to her. Much to her surprise it was actually a discrimination case-a
discrimination directed towards gender, specifically a discrimination directed towards a man.

The case was about a single man caring for her old mother claiming a caregiver’s deduction but the tax
court denied him of said deduction on the ground that under the tax law, only women and men who
have wives who are incapacitated or dead or divorced can claim the salary of caretakers as a deduction.
Clearly the law in this case failed to foresee a situation that there could also be circumstanced a man,
who is unmarried but needs the assistance of caretakers in order to care for her old mother and thus
deducts the salary of said caretaker in his tax liability to somehow relieve him of the financial burden
that the difficulty of his situation entails.

She won. She did not use any strategy, she just reasoned with the fire of her years of oppression coming
from -- the non-availability of comfort rooms for women during her years in Harvard, to the years that
she has been hidden in the shadows of the academe. She was a natural, and she was born to litigate.

The story in essence showed that since time immemorial discriminatory laws have been in existence,
especially discrimination on the basis of sex, be it of the female or male gender. And that while society
accepts this discrimination as legal as it is backed by laws and precedents, the courts may from time to
time and when circumstances so requires, in the interest of reason and equity promulgate precedents
that changes these laws and previous precedents. And sometime all it requires is a catalyst or maybe a
steadfast individual that is eager to prove something and is hell bent to correct a wrong. As one of the
characters in the movies said, the courts ought not to be affected by the weather of the day but by the
climate of the era.

43-Mangalleno