Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan Estrich

A weary kind of hope is doing the heavy lifting here: the belief that civil court could function as a pressure-release valve for women shut out by the criminal justice system. Estrich’s wording is careful and quietly damning. “So many of us” signals a collective project - feminists, lawyers, advocates - who invested in civil litigation as a workaround when prosecutors balked, juries doubted, and evidentiary rules seemed built to punish complainants. The phrase “might be an alternative” carries the subtext of a system that routinely fails at its first job; you don’t reach for alternatives when the primary route is working.

The sentence turns on “burdens.” Estrich is talking about burdens of proof and burdens of endurance. Civil cases ask for “preponderance of evidence,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and the remedies are money and findings, not prison. But “burdens were a little bit less” also hints at the human tax: fewer humiliating cross-examinations, fewer credibility traps, less institutional skepticism. That “little bit” is telling - restrained, even as it implies that the baseline burden is already intolerable.

Context matters: Estrich came of age intellectually alongside the modern rape law reform movement, when “impossible to prove” wasn’t just a cliché but a structural feature of how sexual violence was litigated. Her line captures the strategic pivot that later shaped high-profile cases and, eventually, #MeToo’s reliance on civil suits, employer investigations, and public narratives. It’s not triumphal; it’s a measure of how low expectations had to be to call “easier to prove” a breakthrough.