ERA Project Media Mentions
Media mentions of the ERA Project. Media clippings include references to the work of the ERA Project, and articles where ERA Project faculty, staff, Board and Academic Advisory Council members have provided expertise on issues related to the Equal Rights Amendment.
Media Mentions & Publications by the ERA Project Team
The ERA: A New Foundation for Equality in the United States
Ting Ting Cheng, Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative
November 8, 2022
“A constitutional ERA would strengthen our participatory and pluralistic democracy. It would benefit all, no matter the ideology — protecting those who wish to be free of government intrusion into the most intimate decisions in one’s life and providing a mechanism for transformational social change to improve the lives of the most marginalized and ensure equality. The conversation is far from over — in some ways it is beginning anew.”
The Fight for Equal Rights with Ting Ting Cheng
Hello Uterus Podcast
November 1, 2022
In this episode of the podcast Hello Uterus, Ting Ting Cheng, Director of The ERA Project at Columbia Law School, joins Carol Johnson and Angel Barrera for a sobering conversation about the history of the obstruction of the ERA, the hope for enshrining the ERA in the Constitution, and the work being done at the state level to protect rights for all.
Reimagining Gender Justice: A Conversation with Ting Ting Cheng at Columbia Law School
October 29, 2022
The Columbia Undergraduate Law Review (CULR) is Columbia University's premier undergraduate legal publication. The goal of CULR is to provide Columbia University and the public with opportunities for the discussion of law-related ideas and the publication of undergraduate legal scholarship.
Every year, CULR hosts a High School Essay competition and this year they partnered with the ERA Project to solicit essays on the Equal Rights Amendment. High school students from all over the world submitted their essays. To celebrate the students’ incredible work and Qirui Jiang's winning essay, titled “Building A Gender-Competent International Legal Framework on Sexual Violence,” CULR and the ERA Project hosted a virtual event which featured the essay authors and facilitated a conversation between them and ERA Project Director, Ting Ting Cheng.
Read coverage of this event by Columbia student news here, and read Qirui Jiang's winning essay here.
Protecting Queer Youth: Why Title IX is Not Enough, but the ERA Is!
Caitlin Rich, Women’s eNews
October 13, 2022
Although some originalists might argue the ERA concerned discrimination between [cisgender and heterosexual] women and men when proposed, the ERA Project at Columbia Law School writes, “Historically, gender equality has been advanced and defined by the contributions of Black, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming individuals, not only by cisgender white women. What is more, Black and queer women spearheaded the ERA’s most critical period of revitalization.”
Andrew Nelson, Courthouse News
September 26, 2022
“There is a national narrative that people get abortions for frivolous reasons, that they take the issue very lightly, which I think is almost never the case," [Professor Katherine Franke] said.
The Road to Gender Equity with Ting Ting Cheng and Nadine Epstein
Moment Magazine
September 21, 2022
Women still do not have equal rights to men in the United States, leaving them vulnerable to changing political winds. What needs to be done to finally achieve this critical goal? Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein is hosting a series of informal “dinner party” conversations, exploring long-term strategies that could lead to true gender equity. The focus is not on politics but on big picture legal, organizational and cultural change. In this inaugural conversation, Epstein talks with civil rights attorney Ting Ting Cheng, Director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School.
“The Road to Gender Equity” series is in memory of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose legal strategies, based on the 14th Amendment, helped strengthen the rights of American women.
ERA Reemerges as Archivist Nominee Heads to Senate Hot Seat
Chris Marr & Paige Smith, Bloomberg Law
September 21, 2022
Ting Ting Cheng, director of Columbia University’s ERA Project, said it’s hard to imagine [Colleen] Shogan [President Biden’s nominee for U.S. Archivist] being a “total renegade” and telling the Senate panel she plans to publish the ERA regardless of the Justice Department memo. Biden still has the authority to demand publication, she said.
The Equal Rights Amendment gets a new life in the fight for abortion access
Lisa Rabasca Roepe, Fast Company
September 15, 2022
Advocates are now reluctant to have the Supreme Court decide the fate of the ERA given the court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.
The focus has shifted to the state courts, in part, because the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs indicated it’s up to states to make these decisions, Cheng says. Now several states are working to amend their state constitutions to include an ERA while in other states, plaintiffs have cited the state’s ERA in lawsuits opposing abortion bans and restrictions, Cheng says.
With Roe out the door, the next big abortion battle is already on the Supreme Court steps
Kelsey Reichmann, Courthouse News
September 8, 2022
This is the next battleground in the anti-abortion movement: the recognition of fetal personhood. If fetuses are granted personhood status, then they are entitled to constitutional rights. The court’s recognition of fetal personhood rights would prevent even abortion-friendly states from protecting reproductive rights.
“It is not surprising that anti-abortion advocates would argue that the Dobbs decision be stretched to recognize the idea of ‘fetal personhood,’” said Katherine Franke, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia University. “Overruling Roe v. Wade was never the end game for many of these advocates, so it was just a matter of time before a case making this argument made its way to the Supreme Court.”
How the ERA Can Improve Health Outcomes for Women of Color
Caitlin Rich, Women’s eNews
September 7, 2022
The ERA can enact change both through litigation and legislation. Specifically, the legislative channel is promised by Section 2 of the ERA, since it allows Congress to enforce Section 1’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination. Reflecting further on how publishing the ERA can impact maternal health, Ting Ting Cheng, the Director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, says, “A lot of those deaths were preventable and the result of institutional behavior, neglect, oversight, and ignoring the pain of pregnant people. Congress has a duty to change this.”
The Court Has Decided There Is No Right To Abortion. But What Other Rights Are At Risk?
7/13/2022
Marilisa Palumbo, Corriere Della Sera (Italy)
[Translated from Italian] Moreover - notes Ting Ting Cheng, Director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School in New York - it was one of the three judges nominated by Trump, Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, and reiterated the prohibition of discrimination against LGBTQ workers. The ruling, he explains, established that the definition of sexual discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender expression, and since it interprets a statute and not the Constitution, it is less vulnerable to attack. Additionally, although Dobbs has erased the foundation of privacy on which many of these cases are based, some of them are still anchored in the Equality Protections Clause.
... In recent decades, Cheng says, courts have rejected affirmative action laws in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, applying a very strict standard. Whether the intent of the law was to harm historically marginalized communities based on race, or to apply affirmative action measures to improve the lives of these communities, the Supreme Court treats these laws as race discrimination all the same and, as a result, most were found to be in violation of the 14th Amendment and rejected.
7/12/2022
Jonathan Lai and Jeremy Roebuck, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“You’re starting to see this ramp up” across the country, said Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School. “Lawyers are starting to take a harder look at what equality arguments they can make that are based in their state’s constitutional law.” ... “Pennsylvania may be one of the most interesting test cases in the country,” Cheng said. “It’s not exactly black and white, and it really is up to the democratic process — the executive branch, the legislators, and the courts — working with and against each other.”
6/24/2022
WNYC
Katherine Franke: “The right to contraception and abortion in the 60s and 70s, before Roe, was often argued as an equality right. That was certainly where Justice Ginsburg came down to understand access to abortion as being instrumental to women's full political and economic equality; that we can't function equally in, say, the workplace if we can't control our reproductive bodies.
But there were others that also understood it as a liberty right - that you have the right to make your own autonomous decisions about not just your sexuality, but your family, your future. And others saw it as a sort of incident of enslavement. They went back to the 13th Amendment and said that what denying access to abortion basically amounts to is is sexual slavery, that one becomes enslaved by one's body and one's reproductive capacities if you can't control them. So there are a number of different ways in which to understand access to abortion as a constitutional right.”
True equality in the N.Y. Constitution, finally
6/1/2022
Marcy Syms and Ting Ting Cheng (ERA Project), New York Daily News
Excerpt: The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in Dobbs foreshadows a threat to our most important fundamental rights, beginning with a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and pregnant women’s access to health care. New York can protect these fundamental rights and strengthen these protections. Adding these specific and robust constitutional protections against discrimination on would not only modernize New York’s Constitution from the 19th-century version we have today, but would distinguish the Empire State as a vanguard.
If there was ever a time for the Equal Rights Amendment, it’s now
5/10/2022
Katherine Franke, The Hill
While it may seem counterintuitive, holding and losing the vote to lift the filibuster on the ERA may be just what we need to push it over the finish line.
...
A majority vote of the Senate in favor of lifting the deadline would be what some legal scholars call “a constitutional moment” — the moment that marks a tipping point when a popular majority recognizes that the Constitution has been amended. History teaches us that it is only in retrospect that we realize that the U.S. Constitution has been amended.
Read the full op-ed, explaining why the time for the ERA to be finalized is now.
Want to Protect the Right to Abortion? Pass the ERA!
5/5/2022
ERA Project, Women's eNews
The Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”), which would add an explicit guarantee of sex equality to the United States Constitution, would protect the right to abortion and the full range of reproductive healthcare and is more critically needed now than ever before.
There are several ways to understand how restrictions on access to abortion (and other reproductive health care such as contraception) amount to sex discrimination.
Read our ERA and Abortion Talking Points to learn more.
4/10/2022
Rachel Leventhal, Women's eNews
According to Julie Suk, Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, expert on gender equality and constitutions, author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, and member of the Academic Advisory Council for the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, we need to think of the ERA, “not just as constitutional text, but as the trans-generational movements of women to empower themselves, and to seek recognition of their empowerment.” A movement that begins “even before the Civil War, culminating in the 19th Amendment.”
Similar to the battle for the ERA, which is now on its hundredth year, changing the Constitution to allow women to vote, took a full 70 years. And for the same reasons. “If you don’t have power, it’s hard to get power, when the people who decide who has power don’t include women,” says Professor Suk.
Why Passing the ERA Is as Critical to LGBTQ+ Folks as the Equality Act
3/22/2022
Kate Kelly, The Advocate
As this policy brief by Columbia Law School’s ERA Project explains, “The ERA and the Equality Act are mutually reinforcing pillars of equality.”
...
In fact, trans women like Virginia Delegate Danica Roem, the first out and seated transgender state legislator in U.S. history, have been at the forefront of fighting for the modern ERA, which is succinctly articulated in the policy brief by Columbia Law School's ERA Project:
The premise of the trans-exclusive argument assumes that a kind of stability of identity is required to justify protection from anti-discrimination laws. In fact, the law prohibits religion, marital status, and citizenship-based discrimination even though one can change one’s religion, marital status, or citizenship. Immutability of identity has never been a sine qua non for eligibility for equality protections. The fact that trans people claim an authentic gender identity that may be different from their sex declared at birth does not in any way undermine the legitimacy of their claims to discrimination, nor does it implicate the legitimacy or authority of the law to address discrimination claims raised by cisgender women.
50 years ago sex equality seemed destined for the Constitution. What happened?
3/22/2022
Elizabeth Blair, NPR, All Things Considered
Reporting on the fight against ratification in 1979, NPR's Cokie Roberts explained, "[Phyllis Shlafly and other ERA opponents] worry about losing financial support, women in combat, co-ed bathrooms, homosexual marriage, and a host of other weird and threatening changes in the society."
Today, most of those "weird" changes are legal, says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. "Women in the military, gender neutral bathrooms, marriage equality, all of those things that [Schlafly] said would happen in order to instill fear in people to oppose the ERA did come to pass even without an ERA, and this country, I think, is better for it," said Cheng.
State considers Equal Rights Amendment, reshaping hiring and firing practices
3/9/2022
Brian Pascus, Crain's
“You’d have to look at employment practices and how it will require businesses to get in line with anti-discriminatory laws and clean up their practices that otherwise would violate the state Equal Rights Amendment,” said Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School. “This law will raise the bar.”
Virginia’s Attorney General Drops State’s Bid to ReviveEqual Rights Amendment
2/18/2022
Jess Bravin, Wall Street Journal
Katherine Franke, who directs the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, said the lawsuit against the archivist, even if successful, would do little to settle the status of the amendment.
“It doesn’t solve the looming hard questions of the timeline and the states that have voted to rescind their earlier ratifications,” Prof. Franke said. The Constitution assigns the ratification process not to the executive branch but to Congress and the states, she said, so when it comes to the ERA’s future, “the ball is really in Congress’s court.”
The Equal Rights Amendment and what it would do, explained
2/13/2022
Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
The ERA is necessary, because the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause has "not been sufficient" in being protective of the rights of women and others, said Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke, who is the faculty director of the ERA Project, the school's policy think tank on the ERA.
Since the ERA would be freestanding, "it's not tied in any way to the status quo version of equality, and in that sense, it should cover forms of discrimination that may be unintentional but quite potent," Franke told CNN.
...
Franke told CNN that the ERA provides a "very different approach to equality" than the one we have today, so the amendment would accommodate these programs that the Eagle Forum is worried about, and ending those programs could be a form of sex discrimination.
The ERA, according to Franke, would allow for "affirmative measures to dismantle existing forms of sex equality."
The Equal Rights Amendment Isn’t Just Your Grandmother’s Civil Rights Movement
2/11/2022
Kathryn Rubino, Above the Law
In this episode, Kathryn Rubino speaks with Ting Ting Cheng, Director of the ERA Project, and Kati Hornung, Director of VoteEqualityUS, about the current status of the Equal Rights Amendment and why the amendment is so vital in 2022. Ting Ting and Kati discuss their varying perspectives and skill sets when tackling the ERA, and what they say to people who think gender equality is a passé issue or something that’s already been achieved. They also discuss the motivations behind the new and improved pocket Constitutions, and what things they believe would be different in this country if the ERA were part of the Constitution. Ting Ting and Kati also speak about the litigation strategy for the ERA and the best ways for others to get involved.
Maloney Issues Statement on Biden Administration Memo on Ratifying the ERA
1/30/2022
The National Herald
On October 21, 2021, Chairwoman Maloney sent a letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris sharing a legal analysis from constitutional scholars affiliated with Columbia Law School’s ERA Project, concluding that the Trump Administration’s OLC opinion is legally unsound and should be withdrawn. The analysis found that the OLC opinion “sought to advance a policy preference against the ERA,” and is “lacking a thoroughly reasoned understanding of precedent and Congressional power under the Constitution.” Since October, some of the most prominent legal and constitutional scholars in the country have added their support and signatures to the analysis.
Why Can’t We Make Women’s Equality the Law of the Land?
1/28/2022
Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
“I started out thinking the E.R.A. was exceptional for raising difficult Article V questions,” David Pozen, a professor at Columbia Law School, [Advisory Board member of Columbia Law School's ERA Project] and the co-author of a recent study on the history of amendments, told me. “On the contrary, almost every single amendment that we have has been only debatably in compliance with Article V.” For example, Mr. Pozen pointed out, only one of the 27 recognized amendments — the 13th, which abolished slavery — received a president’s signature before being sent to the states. And yet Article I of the Constitution states clearly that “every order, resolution, or vote” of Congress must be approved by the president before it can “take effect.” Are amendments exempt from this requirement? If not, is every amendment but the 13th invalid?
Supporters of the ERA push for publication despite lingering legal questions
1/27/2022
Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
The OLC released a new memo Wednesday night, saying that its 2020 memo is "not an obstacle either to Congress's ability to act with respect to ratification of the ERA or to judicial consideration of questions regarding the constitutional status of the ERA."
According to The ERA Project at Columbia Law School, the new OLC memo does not withdraw its 2020 memo nor does it instruct the archivist to publish the ERA, but suggests that the issue is properly before the federal courts and Congress.
Should the ERA be in effect? On a key anniversary, it depends who you ask.
1/27/2022
Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th
The ERA Project at Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality has developed legal analysis on the Equal Rights Amendment. The group, which does not lobby lawmakers but instead shares research with [policymakers] and others, also believes the 2020 DOJ opinion should be withdrawn in part because it goes beyond the scope of the office’s duties. It called Thursday’s new opinion “a significant victory.”
“Congress historically has the role, and constitutionally has the role, to resolve any disputes in the Constitutional amendment process,” Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project, told The 19th.
This Is What The Constitution Should Look Like
1/12/2022
Kathryn Rubino, Above the Law
Today the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School and VoteEqualityUS have released a pocket version of the Constitution. You probably haven’t thought about your pocket Constitution since law school, but this new version is way better than that old one — that’s because this one contains a 28th Amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment.
Our United States Constitution
December 2021
VoteEquality U.S. and ERA Project
Our friends at VoteEquality U.S. have created a Pocket Constitution which includes the ERA as the 28th Amendment. We are proud to contribute a hopeful foreword that envisions what We the People can and should mean. You can order your pocket constitution here.
Is the ERA part of the Constitution? Depends on whom you ask. (op-ed)
11/22/2021
David Pozen and Thomas P. Schmidt, Washington Post
"[H]istory holds at least two lessons for the ERA. The first is that for all that is distinctive about the amendment’s story, there is nothing unusual about the legal uncertainty that surrounds its status. On the contrary, attempts to amend the Constitution have consistently generated difficult legal puzzles. Critics of the ERA insist that its compliance with Article V is “constitutionally suspect.” The same could be said of nearly every recognized amendment. The Constitution supplies only limited guidance when fights break out over the textual content of the Constitution itself.
The second lesson is that the fate of the ERA should now rest in the hands of Congress. Because the law of Article V is so unsettled, controversies over the amendment process will continue to arise. It is critical that we have some means of resolving these controversies authoritatively and peacefully. Congress is in the best position to serve this function."
The Big Idea: Modernizing the Constitution with Professor Julie Suk (video)
November 2021
Fordham Law School
Professor Julie Suk is an interdisciplinary legal scholar, focusing on women as constitution-makers at the intersection of law, history, sociology, and politics. Professor Suk’s interest in constitutional and social change has led her to explore the twenty-first-century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in her latest book, “We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.” She is also a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School. Professor Suk’s scholarship calls for the modernization of the U.S. Constitution to make it more inclusive and responsive to twenty-first century concerns.
You Can Still Say ‘Woman’ But you shouldn’t stop there.
10/28/2021
Irin Carmon, New York Magazine
“Once we start thinking about trans people, that gets more complicated,” Katherine Franke, a law professor and the director of Columbia’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, told me.
Franke had to contend with this tension in co-writing a brief before Pennsylvania’s state supreme court, arguing that denying Medicaid coverage for abortion violates the state’s equal-rights amendment. “I want to win, and I care about how we get there,” Franke says. “We’re making sure that our briefs are not trans exclusive — but making them trans inclusive is an even bigger lift. For that reason, I’m much more attracted to the stereotyping argument: that the denial of abortion rights is about perpetuating a set of gender stereotypes about who belongs at home or in the boardroom or in politics.”
So Franke’s brief in the Pennsylvania case, co-authored with Ting Ting Cheng, acknowledges that “gender-based stereotypes and norms burden not only women but also men,” as well as those “who do not conform to traditional expectations of what it means to be a man or a woman.” Refusing to cover abortion on the state’s Medicaid, they write, “functionally relegates low income women and pregnant people generally to second class status.”
Maloney Urges Archivist, Biden Administration to Certify and Publish the ERA
10/22/2021
The National Herald
"The letter highlighted a new legal analysis of the Trump OLC memo by preeminent constitutional and legal scholars affiliated with Columbia Law School’s ERA Project, including Erwin Chemerinsky. These scholars found that the Trump Administration’s OLC memo is based on a faulty legal analysis and should be withdrawn."
10/19/2021
Carrie Baker, Ms. Magazine
"A wide range of organizations filed briefs supporting the challenge, including New Voices for Reproductive Justice and 24 other organizations advocating for Black women and girls; the ERA Project at Columbia Law School; the National Women’s Law Center; faith-based organizations; medical organizations and healthcare providers; the ACLU of Pennsylvania; the National Health Law Program; and members of the Democratic Caucuses of the Pennsylvania House and Senate."
Constitution Day Is The Perfect Day To Remind You We Still Don’t Have Equal Rights
9/17/2021
Kathryn Rubino, Above the Law
"[T]he ERA Project at Columbia Law School — a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, & expert guidance on the Equal Rights Amendment — has taken a slightly different approach. For Constitution Day, and as we come upon the one-year anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, they want to remind us that there still is not a constitutional amendment to guarantee equal treatment based on sex. Indeed, as a reminder, way back in 1787 when the Constitution was signed, it was not intended to include women. So, you know, an actual amendment about that is probably overdue."
Why Is This Happening? Reforming sexual justice with Alexandra Brodsky (Podcast)
9/9/2021
Chris Hayes, MSNBC
Alexandra Brodsky: "[...] And so I think that a richer understanding of why sexual harassment is sex discrimination that avoids this problem, and I think is also just true, is actually just right, and I talk about this in the book, relying primarily on Katherine Franke's work, she's a law professional at Columbia, who talks about the ways in which sexual harassment is both based in sex stereotypes and then serves to replicate sex stereotypes."
Announcing: Our First 7 Honorees for ’21 Leaders for the 21st Century’ 2021!!
Women's eNews
7/6/2021
Ting Ting Cheng is among Women's eNews' honorees for 21 Leaders for the 21st Century.
"Ting Ting Cheng is the Director of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project at Columbia Law School. As a civil rights attorney and activist, she litigated gender discrimination cases at Legal Momentum, the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was also an attorney at the New York City Commission for Human Rights, a public defender and immigrant defense attorney at Brooklyn Defender, and the Legal Director of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington."
American Families Plan can pave the way for a gender equity New Deal (op-ed)
Ting Ting Cheng and Marcy Syms, The Hill
5/3/2021
The time has come to not only put an end to national economic policies that embrace what feminist historian Linda Gordon describes in the book “Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare” as “a male vision,” but to repair historic disinvestment in women workers and especially women of color. This will require sex and race based set-asides in federal contracting, hiring women and people of color-owned businesses, including affirmative hiring and employment benchmarks in funding programs, and of course, universal child care, parenting leave and protections for pregnant workers, among other measures. It will also require enacting a constitutional protection against gender bias, in the form of the Equal Rights Amendment, to provide an ironclad protection of women’s rights.
The Biden administration’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans are an initial step towards removing and remedying the gender and racial bias baked into the U.S. social and economic policy. As a next step, Congress should act promptly to lift the deadline holding up the Equal Rights Amendment’s inclusion in the Constitution, thus securing sex equality, not as the gift or wisdom of one president only to be undone by the next, but as an explicit constitutional right that must be respected in every governmental law and policy.
The Equal Rights Amendment: How Long Must American Women Wait?
Power Up Women! Podcast
4/14/2021
It has been 97 years since Suffragist Alice Paul first drafted the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, beginning the long and still unsuccessful fight for equal protection under the law for American women. Even today, the USA is the ONLY modern democracy that does not explicitly include protections against sex-based discrimination in its Constitution. With more women, including women of color, elected to state and federal office, the ERA is once again gaining momentum. Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke, who recently launched THE ERA PROJECT and Barbara Rodriguez, a journalist covering the renewed ERA push for The 19th clear up the misinformation and intentional disinformation about what the ERA would do and shed light on what it will take to finally get it passed.
The nearly century-long battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment
CBS This Morning Podcast, CBS News
4/1/2021
"Columbia University Law professor Katherine Franke joins CBS News congressional reporter Nikole Killion to discuss the status of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Initially proposed in 1923 and passed by Congress in 1972, the amendment would enshrine sex-based equality in the U.S. Constitution. Finally ratified by the required number of states in 2020, the status of the ERA remains an open question. Franke, head of the ERA Project at Columbia University's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, explains the current roadblocks and additional steps required in order to have the Equal Rights Amendment officially added to the U.S. Constitution as the 28th Amendment."
The Roadblocks to Equal Rights for Women, a Century Later
Alisha Haridasani Gupta, New York Times
3/17/2021
“Several legal scholars agree. Since the deadline is in the preamble, it may not even be legally binding, said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia and faculty director of its E.R.A. Project research initiative. She also noted that, in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has full control over the process of finalizing a constitutional amendment, which is how Congress already extended the E.R.A. deadline once.
“It’s, in many respects, an embarrassment that we don’t have express sex equality protections,” Ms. Franke said. “The E.R.A. provides an opportunity for a more modern approach to equality — I see it as a kind of modernizing tuneup of the Constitution that is way overdue.””
House passes joint resolution to remove ERA deadline
Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
3/17/2021
“Katherine Franke, faculty director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, said during an event Monday that even if Congress were to pass the resolutions declaring the ERA to have been completed "that will not put an end to the debates" and to expect litigation challenging that process.
Franke said key open legal questions include whether Congress has the power to change or lift its deadline retroactively, whether courts have jurisdiction over the ratification process itself, and whether states have the power to rescind an earlier ratification of an amendment.”
Federal judge says deadline to ratify ERA 'expired long ago' in setback to advocates' efforts
Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
3/6/2021
“Katherine Franke, faculty director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, said in a statement Saturday that "by dismissing the lawsuit, the federal court affirmed that making the ERA part of the U.S. Constitution lies primarily in the hands of the people and their elected representatives."
"Yesterday's ruling is not really a setback for sex equality or the ERA, rather it renews our focus on the bill introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier (with 203 co-sponsors from both political parties) that would declare the ERA fully ratified whenever three-quarters of the states have voted to do so," Franke continued.”
Maloney, Reed Introduce Equal Rights Amendment
March 1, 2021
Press Release, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney
“It is encouraging to see the ERA emerge as a priority in the 117th Congress,” said Professor Katherine Franke, Faculty Director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School. "The U.S. Constitution, the world’s oldest written constitution, is the only major written constitution in the world that lacks specific protections for sex-based equality. This is a national embarrassment that the ERA is designed to fix.”
Congress Revives Push for Equal Rights Amendment
February 27, 2021
Kristina Peterson, Wall Street Journal
"The ERA would “impose a mandate upon the federal government, and state governments too, to take affirmative measures to dismantle existing sex-based inequality,” said Katherine Franke, faculty director at the ERA Project at Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. The ERA wouldn’t directly affect private businesses, she said, but it “may create a brand new norm that gets taken up by the private sector as a standard operating procedure around equality.”"
The ERA: The Amendment is Just the Beginning
February 24, 2021
Editors, Women's eNews
"“It is important to include academic expertise encompassing a range of disciplines to effectively convey what the ERA should and would do,” Dr. Franke says.
[...]
[It] is not only women who would benefit from the amendment’s ratification. The ERA would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in multiple forms including discrimination against men, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex or gender stereotyping (such as discrimination against a person because they are a masculine woman or a feminine man), as well as discrimination in access to health care, including reproductive health care. Essentially, the ERA would make sex-based equality explicit in the US Constitution for the very first time, and benefit everyone. “It is not a women’s rights amendment, it is a sex equality amendment,” Prof. Franke adds."
Music Industry Moves: Sub Pop Records Opens Seattle Flagship Store
January 25, 2021
Elise Shafer, Variety
Wade Leak, deputy general counsel at Sony Music Entertainment, and Liz Young, the company’s former EVP and global head of communications, are among the founding board of advisors for a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy recommendations and expert guidance on the Equal Rights Amendment. The Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality Law is headed by professor Katherine Franke, and was launched in 2004. The ERA Project nods to the late Columbia alumnus Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who taught the school’s first sex discrimination law courses. Head here for more information.