[Kobi]

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Allen Derr, an Idaho lawyer who won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling to bolster anti-discrimination protections for women, died Monday in Boise. He was 85.

On Nov. 22, 1971, the Supreme Court justices issued their Reed vs. Reed decision, holding states cannot discriminate against people because of their gender. It marked a departure from the era when courts often excluded women from full participation in important civil affairs.

His client, Sally Reed, a woman challenging her estranged husband over which of them should be appointed to oversee their son's estate following his suicide, was fighting to overturn an Idaho courts' decision based on an 1864 Idaho law: If more than one person claimed to be equally entitled to be trustee, "males must be preferred to females."

Characteristically humble, Derr described his role in the case in 2011 as nothing extraordinary.

"I was just doing my job," he said two years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the decision when he was honored by at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., alongside the lawyer who wrote Reed's legal brief: Current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The decision in Reed vs. Reed has been celebrated in the 2001 book by historians Alan Brinkley and James McPherson, "Days of Destiny," as among a handful of uncelebrated events that nonetheless changed the course of history.

Derr remembered clearly Sally Reed's frustration when she came into his office in Boise, seeking help.

"When she came to me, she'd just been turned down by the probate court, in a very short, one-page decision," he said. "She was hurt and outraged."

Derr's basic argument was simple. The U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment forbade such discrimination.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing the unanimous decision, agreed.

"To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," Burger wrote.