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Testimony To The Senate Judiciary Committee By The Era Project At Columbia Law School And Constitutional Law Scholars On Joint Resolution S.J.Res. 4: Removing The Deadline For The Ratification Of The Equal Rights Amendment, Katherine M. Franke, Laurence H. Tribe, Geoffrey R. Stone, Melissa Murray, Michael C. Dorf

Faculty Scholarship

The Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School (ERA Project) and the undersigned constitutional law scholars provide the following analysis of S.J.Res. 4, resolving to remove the time limit for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and declaring the ERA fully ratified.

Era Project Olc Letter, Katherine M. Franke, David E. Pozen, Erwin Chemerinsky, Melissa Murray, Laurence H. Tribe, Martha Minow, Geoffrey C. Stone, Cary Franklin, Michael C. Dorf, Victoria Nourse

Faculty Scholarship

The Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School (“ERA Project”) and the undersigned scholars submit this letter at the request of your office to provide legal analysis of the January 6, 2020 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel Memorandum to the National Archives and Records Administration on the Equal Rights Amendment (“2020 OLC Memo”).

The Puzzles And Possibilities Of Article V, David E. Pozen, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars describe Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth rules for amending the document, as an uncommonly stringent and specific constitutional provision. A unanimous Supreme Court has said that a “mere reading demonstrates” that “Article V is clear in statement and in meaning, contains no ambiguity, and calls for no resort to rules of construction.” Although it is familiar that a small set of amendments, most notably the Reconstruction Amendments, elicited credible challenges to their validity, these episodes are seen as anomalous and unrepresentative. Americans are accustomed to disagreeing over the meaning of the constitutional text, but …

We The Unconventional American People, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1991 volume, We the People: Foundations, Bruce Ackerman urged us as Americans to declare our independence from European models of government and to “look inward” to rediscover our distinctive constitutional scheme--dualist democracy.1 In his new volume, We the People: Transformations, he exhorts us as dualist democrats to break up the monopoly that Article V of the Constitution has held on our vision of constitutional amendment. He urges us to move “beyond Article V” and to embrace a pluralist understanding of the sources of higher lawmaking (pp 15-17). Only by doing so, he argues, will we be able …

Parlor Game, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution is not perfect. Indeed I don't know what 'perfection' is in a constitution, since it is an instrument for human hands and thus must bear within its possibilities all the potential for misuse that comes with the user. What I am sure of is that 'perfection' does not mean 'never needs to be amended,' since one important part of the Constitution is its provision for amendment (although I am inclined to believe that few of the amendments to the U.S. constitution were actually necessary.)

That said, a competition to find the "stupidest provision of the Constitution" is, to …