Oct. 30th, 2023 – Gender-Based Violence & the Equal Rights Amendment: A Discussion About Sex Equality and U.S. v. Rahimi
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and the ERA Project is spotlighting United States v. Rahimi, a gun rights case that will test the Supreme Court's new 2nd Amendment standard under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In the lead-up to the November 7th oral arguments in Rahimi, join ERA Project Academic Advisory Council members Victoria Nourse (Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown Law) and Julie Goldscheid (Professor of Law at CUNY Law) for a discussion moderated by ERA Project Policy Associate Naomi Young. On the agenda: What is at stake in this case? And how could the Equal Rights Amendment reorient the legal system's responses to gender-based violence?
Previous Events
July 21st-22nd, 2023 – ERA Centennial Convention
The ERA Centennial Convention is an intergenerational convening that took place in Seneca Falls, NY on the 100-year anniversary of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Convention was held on July 21st-22nd, 2023, at the First Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls where the National Woman’s Party first unveiled the ERA—at the exact same podium Alice Paul gave her speech 100 years ago. The event focused on cultivating the next generation of ERA activists and helping them see their place in history as Constitution-makers. We organized the Convention alongside Equal Rights Action and Generation Ratify, with fiscal sponsorship from the Alice Paul Institute.
Ahead of the convention, delegates were invited to participate in the Reimagining Gender Justice Curriculum, a free 5-part workshop series in preparation for the convening. Workshop recordings are available on our Youtube channel.
More on the ERA Centennial Convention here.
March 3rd-4th, 2022 – The ERA Symposium: A New Guarantee of Sex Equality in the U.S. Constitution
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. 2022 marked 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 to deploy 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.
Learn more about the 2022 Symposium and access recorded sessions here.
March 24, 2022 - Legal Advocacy for LGBTQ Rights in China
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, reflects 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.
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.
This event was 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.
September 28, 2021 - Advance Film Screening: My Name Is Pauli Murray
On September 28, 2021, The Center for Gender and Sexuality Law's Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project hosted a free online screening of the documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray. 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.
The screening was followed by a live Q&A with ERA Project Director, Ting Ting Cheng, Betsy West, and Julie Cohen – the film's directors and Columbia alums.
February 8, 2021 - Equal Rights Amendment Talk with Professor Julie Suk
This event is part of the Front Lines of Gender Justice Speaker Series.
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.