The Equal Rights Amendment Reconsidered: Politics, Policy, and Social Mobilization in a Democracy

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald T. Critchlow ◽  
Cynthia L. Stachecki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

In the early 1970s, fifty years after its first appearance in the U.S. Congress, the Equal Rights Amendment came the closest it ever would to ratification. The ERA declared: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” After sailing through Congress in 1972 with bipartisan support, the amendment went to the states for ratification. The response was positive and immediate: Hawaii approved the ERA the same day, twenty-one other states approved it before the end of the year, and eight more states the following year. Yet, by 1982 the amendment lay dead, having fallen three states short of the thirty-eight states needed for ratification.

Equality Challenged: Equal Rights and Sexual Difference

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Sherron de Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Federal Legislation ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
The Law

“ERA Won't Go Away!” The words were chanted at rallies and unfurled on banners at countless marches as the deadline—June 30, 1982—approached for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. To include in the Constitution the principle of equality of rights for women, supporters insisted, was an essential of republican government in a democratic society. Congress had shared that perception in 1972, passing a series of measures aimed at strengthening and expanding federal legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sex. Included was a constitutional amendment simply stating that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Thirty-five of the thirty-eight states necessary for a three-fourths majority needed to amend the Constitution had given their approval.

The senator’s discriminatory intent

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otto Santa Ana
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
State Official ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

Abstract This is a critical analysis of the discourse of an elected state official in the years leading up to the passage of arguably racist legislation. It was submitted to a U.S. court of law to support the plaintiffs’ claim that since the legislator publicly expressed racial bias against the groups of people affected by the law, then his legislation should be voided because the United States Constitution requires that laws treat citizens equally. The fact that critical discourse analytic findings have been entered into the U.S. courts leads to the question whether such analyses of public pronouncements May ever be permitted to serve as legally probative evidence.

scholarly journals Revitalizing The U.S. Compliance Power

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Charnovitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Court Of Justice ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
International Obligation ◽  
International Court ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

Although “[tjreaties are the law of the land, and a rule of decision in all courts,” the president and the courts may sometimes be powerless to achieve compliance with a U.S. treaty. That was the puzzling outcome of Medellin v. Texas. Even though the Supreme Court declared that the United States has an international obligation to comply with the Avena judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Court invalidated the president’s memorandum directing Texas and other errant states to comply.

The Fourth Restatement, International Law, and the “Terrorism” Exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

2020 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Beth Stephens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Sovereign Immunity ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

This chapter evaluates the “terrorism” exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States sets out to “restate” the law of the United States and “relevant portions of international law,” not to critique U.S. law or settle debates about the content of international law. However, that task is complicated when the law of the United States triggers questions about unresolved international law issues. The “terrorism” exception to the FSIA illustrates this complexity. Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary have employed the exception as a politically motivated weapon to target disfavored states, while excluding U.S. allies, politically powerful states, and the United States itself from the reach of the statute. The text of the Fourth Restatement merely restates the U.S. law governing the “terrorism” exception, without identifying international law concerns or analyzing the issues they raise. The chapter, by contrast, offers a critique of the “terrorism” exception, focusing on the statute as written, as amended to reach particular targets, and as applied in practice. A well-crafted statutory exception to sovereign immunity for state human rights violations would be a welcome addition to human rights accountability. The “terrorism” exception falls far short of that goal.

The Potential and Pitfalls of Pan-American Feminism

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-228
Author(s):  
Anya Jabour
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Pan American ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 8 follows Breckinridge to the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she and other women activists in both the United States and Latin America vigorously debated the meaning of women’s equality. Breckinridge’s clashes with Doris Stevens, the U.S. leader of the Inter-American Commission of Women, over the proposed Equal Nationality Treaty and Equal Rights Treaty laid bare the conflicts inherent in Pan-American feminism. At the same time, U.S. and Latin American women’s activists’ diverse understandings of feminism helped to lay the groundwork for the idea that “women’s rights are human rights.”

The Equal Rights Amendment, Then and Now

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie C. Suk
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Meanings ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The U.S

One hundred years in the making, the Equal Rights Amendment is the only proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that has met the requirements of Article V of the Constitution but has not been added to the Constitution due to a congressionally imposed ratification deadline. The amendment guarantees that “[e]quality of rights shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” like gender equality guarantees in most constitutions around the world. This chapter exposes the unique trajectory of the Equal Rights Amendment to shed light on the process of feminist constitutional change and the evolution of substantive feminist legal aspirations. The revival of the ERA ratification process, decades after Congress’s deadlines, has generated transgenerational public meanings for a new body of gender equality law and public policy.

scholarly journals La lucha por la la vida frente al necropoder estadunidense

Norteamérica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariadna Estévez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The Face ◽  
White Supremacists ◽  
The Law ◽  
Postcolonial States ◽  
First World ◽  
The U.S

Necropower—defined as the power to produce and administer—has its first-world expression the United States. This expression is characterized by a spatially differentiated use of the law to enable nativists, neonazis, and white supremacists as well as anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, and gun rights activists, among others, for the use of death technologies. By examining the case of the African American community, this article shows how the U.S., led by Donald Trump, sustains a necropower differing from that of Postcolonial states only in its use of the law instead of legal exception to create death spaces. Additionally, the article highlights the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a resistance for life in the face of necropower.

Organized Labor, National Politics, and Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, 1965–1975

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis A. Deslippe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

scholarly journals The problem of hate crimes in the United States of America

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ewelina Bachera ◽  
Stephan V. Jupinko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Extended Projection ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

The aim of this article is to draw attention to an issue that has a long history: the problem of hate crimes in the United States of America. There is no doubt that hate crimes are the type of crime that attack the very principle of individuality that is an entitlement under the equal protection of the law (in the U.S.). Bearing the foregoing in mind the above, and that the number of such crime has increased at an alarming rate, this article describes and discusses types of hate crimes such as: Racist and Religious Hate Crimes, Sexual Orientation-Based Hate Crimes and Disability Hate Crimes as an extended projection of the analysis, several solutions have been proposed to mitigate tensions and combat the prevalence and severity of hate crime in all its forms.

Constitutional Adjudication as a Means of Realizing the Equal Stature of Men and Women Under the Law

1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Law ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication ◽  
The U.S

My remarks center on case law written in the United States, since 1970, on the equal stature of men and women under the law. Before taking up that development, I will make some opening comments about this conspicuous difference between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the U.S. Bill of Rights, as ratified 200 years ago: equality is a central theme of the French Declaration; the word "equal" or "equality," by contrast, does not even appear in the original U.S. Constitution or in the first ten amendments that compose the Bill of Rights.

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