The ERA Project hosts educational panels, film screenings, white paper presentations and fundraisers.
See below for past and upcoming events.
Watch the 2022 ERA Symposium
Thursday, March 24, 2022
12:10pm - 1:10pm ET
Jerome Greene Hall, 435 W. 116th St, New York, NY 10027 - Room 102B
In the 2010s, Chinese LGBTQ advocates began using impact litigation and other legal strategies to advance claims for equal rights. What were the results of this approach? Former director of LGBT Rights Advocacy China, Peng Yanhui, will reflect on the past decade of his work and what the future holds for China’s LGBTQ movement in a time of political closing and backlash.
This event is organized by the Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies and sponsored by the Society for Chinese Law, Columbia OutLaws, and the Equal Rights Amendment Project.
Darius Longarino (龙大瑞) is a Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center. Prior to joining the Center, he worked for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative in Beijing where he managed legal reform programs promoting LGBT rights and worked cooperatively with a number of Chinese public interest law organizations. Darius speaks and reads Mandarin Chinese, and received a J.D. from Columbia Law School (2013), where he was a Kent scholar and received the Edwin Parker Prize for Excellence in Comparative or International Law. As a law student, he interned with a legal aid organization in New York, a public interest law organization in China, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Court of International Trade. Prior to law school, he was an assistant to Professor Jerome A. Cohen at New York University School of Law's US-Asia Law Institute.
Yanhui Peng is a researcher at the Nankai University Zhou Enlai School of Government’s Institute on Community Development and the former director of LGBT Rights Advocacy China. Peng founded LGBT Rights Advocacy China in 2013 to advance LGBT equality through China’s legal system. LGBT Rights Advocacy China built professional networks of lawyers and journalists, and supported impact litigation against conversion therapy, employment discrimination, media censorship, and homophobic university textbooks. In 2019, Peng and his colleagues started a campaign to submit proposals to lawmakers that called for legalizing same-sex marriage in China’s Civil Code, catalyzing a large number of submissions and drawing significant attention to the issue. From 2007 to 2013, Peng was a program manager at Sun Yat-Sen University’s Institute for Civil Society, and in 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. At the Paul Tsai China Center, Peng will conduct research and writing on the parental rights of LGBT people.
Contact Information
Nick Pozek
2128540685
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
The 2022 symposium on “The Equal Rights Amendment: A New Guarantee of Sex Equality in the U.S. Constitution” was held virtually on March 3rd and 4th, 2022.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Virginia, and the 50th anniversary of Reed v. Reed, two of the most significant sex-based equality cases to reach the Supreme Court. This symposium examined what a modern vision of sex/gender equality could embody and how might that vision be realized through a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). We explored how existing equality protections under the 14th Amendment would differ from the protections under an ERA, what higher standard of protection against sex discrimination could the ERA secure, what an anti-subordination approach to equality more generally might look like, and how the ERA could strengthen anti-discrimination protections for other protected classes. Through an intersectional lens, we analyzed the ERA’s potential in deploying dynamic strategies to advance gender equality norms.
This symposium was organized by Columbia Law School's ERA Project and the Journal of Gender and Law.
WATCH THE SYMPOSIUM
You can watch video recordings of all sessions on YouTube here.
INFORMATION REGARDING NY CLE CREDITS
Columbia Law School has been certified by the New York State Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Board as an Accredited Provider of CLE programs. Under New York State CLE regulations, this live simultaneous transmission transitional and non-transitional CLE Program will provide 4 credit hours that can be applied toward the Areas of Professional Practice requirement and 4 credit hours that can be applied toward the Diversity, Inclusion & Elimination of Bias requirement. CLE credit is awarded only to New York attorneys for full attendance of individual Program sessions in their entirety. Attendance is determined by an attorney's completion of polls during the live webinar. Attorneys also should submit their completed Evaluation Form, provided by the program organizers. Please note the NYS Certificates of Attendance will be sent to the email address as it appears in the register unless otherwise noted there.
DOWNLOADS
Click on the links below to download symposium materials:
SCHEDULE
DAY 1: THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2022
10:45am - 11:00 am ET | Dean's Welcome and Opening Remarks
- Gillian Lester, Dean of the Faculty of Law and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
- Katherine Franke, James L. Dohr Professor of Law and Faculty Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
- Ting Ting Cheng, Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
11:00am - 1:00pm ET | Session 1: The Meaning of a 21st Century ERA
This panel will set the stage for the history and revitalization of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), going in depth into the constitutional requirements for the amendment ratification process, legal and political hurdles, and the current challenges to its implementation. What are the paths forward? What does an inclusive and feminist ERA look like, what would it mean, and why do we need it?
- Dave Pozen, Vice Dean for Intellectual Life and Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
- Julie Suk, Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
- Jennifer McClellan, Virtginia State Senator
- Michelle Kallen, Former Virginia Solicitor General
- Moderator: Ting Ting Cheng, Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
1:30pm - 3:30pm ET | Session 2: ERA and the 14th Amendment’s Gender Equality Jurisprudence - From Reed v. Reed to U.S. v. Virginia and Beyond
This panel will discuss the foundational work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a litigator and Supreme Court Justice in building the groundwork for gender equality in the Constitution, and what commentators have referred to as the de facto ERA. This panel will analyze and critique the 14th Amendment’s formal equality model and tiers of scrutiny, and its deficiencies in addressing inequality today. Speakers will also explore what a substantive equality model would look like in contrast.
- Cary Franklin, McDonald/Wright Chair of Law and Faculty Director, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law
- Kendall Thomas, Nash Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
- Victoria Nourse, Ralph Whitworth Professor of Law, Georgetown Law School
- Moderator: Olatunde Johnson, Jerome B. Sherman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
DAY 2: FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2022
10:00am - 12:00pm ET | Session 3: ERA and Abortion - Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights
This panel will explore access to abortion as an equality right that includes pregnant people of various gender identities. In anticipation of a post-Roe landscape and as the Supreme Court deliberates the parameters of reproductive justice in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, this panel will ground the right to abortion in equality principles found in the 14th Amendment and promised in the Equal Rights Amendment.
- Reva Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School
- Serena Mayeri, Professor of Law and History, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
- Moderator: Katherine Franke, James L. Dohr Professor of Law and Faculty Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
1:30pm - 3:30pm ET | Session 4: Gender Justice and the ERA in Practice
This panel will investigate how explicit gender protection in the Constitution could transform federal laws and different areas of the law in practice to address the pressing needs of today, such as abortion access, anti-pregnancy discrimination, reproductive health access, maternal mortality, medical coverage, paid leave, childcare infrastructure and the care economy.
- Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Director, Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, UC Irvine Law
- Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
- Kate Andrias, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
- Jody Heymann, Distinguished Professor and Founding Director, WORLD Policy Analysis Center, UCLA
- Moderator: Candace Bond-Theriault, Director, Racial Justice Policy and Strategy, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School
3:30pm - 4:00pm ET | Keynote Address and Closing Remarks
- Keynote Speaker: Letitia James, Attorney General, State of New York
- Katherine Franke, James L. Dohr Professor of Law and Faculty Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
- Ting Ting Cheng, Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School
Invite others to register for this free symposium: https://tinyurl.com/ERASymposium2022
Register at bit.ly/mynameispaulimurray
The Center for Gender and Sexuality Law's Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project invites you to a free online screening of the documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray. The screening will be followed by a live Q&A with ERA Project Director, Ting Ting Cheng, and Betsy West and Julie Cohen -- the film's directors and Columbia alums.
The film looks at the life and ideas of Pauli Murray, a non-binary Black lawyer, activist, Episcopalian priest and poet who influenced both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall.
This event is hosted by the ERA Project, a law and policy think tank established in January 2021 to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.
This event is part of the Front Lines of Gender Justice Speaker Series.
Monday, February 8, 2021
4:30pm - 6:00pm EST
Join Professor Katherine Franke (James L. Dohr Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the ERA Project), in conversation with Professor Julie Suk (CUNY Graduate Center) on the importance and challenges of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
Julie C. Suk is a leading scholar of constitutional gender equality in the United States and around the world. Her recent book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, charts the legal, historical, and political significance of the ERA's current resurgence, enabled by generations of women constitution-makers.