Our Mission

The ERA Project at NYU Law's Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center is a law and policy think tank established in January 2021 at Columbia Law School 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.

The ERA Project does not engage in lobbying, but instead develops academic, legal, and policy expertise to support efforts to expand protections for gender-based equality and justice.

Our Team

Ting Ting Cheng (she/her) ∙ Director

Ting Ting Cheng is the Director of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project at NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center where she develops academically rigorous research, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on adding explicit sex equality to the U.S. Constitution and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.

Before joining the ERA Project in 2021, she litigated gender discrimination cases at Legal Momentum (formerly the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund) and was the Legal Director of the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017, helping to organize the largest single-day protest in US history. Earlier, she was a public defender and immigration attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services, which piloted the first universal representation model for immigrant defense in the U.S. Ting Ting was a foreign law clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa for Justice Albie Sachs and Justice Edwin Cameron.

Ting Ting has written for a range of publications, such as Ms. Magazine, Harvard Social Impact Review, the American Bar Association’s Perspectives Publication, and the State Court Report, and has offered commentary for numerous media outlets including CNN, NPR, the Nation, New York Magazine, Bloomberg News, the 19th, Mother Jones, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ting Ting serves on the Boards of the Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice, North Star Project, Vital Strategies, and Period Law.

Our Academic Advisory Council

Julie Suk

Hon. Deborah A. Batts Distinguished Research Scholar, Professor of Law, Fordham School of Law
Victoria Nourse

Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Julie Goldscheid

Professor Emeritus, CUNY School of Law
Erwin Chemerinsky

Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
Mabel Abraham

Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Penelope Andrews

John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law, NYU Law
David Pozen

Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Martha Davis

University Distinguished Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Cary Franklin

Professor & McDonald/Wright Chair of Law, UCLA School of Law
Mitu Gulati

Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Meredith Rosenthal

C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy, Harvard School of Public Health
Serena Mayer

Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Darren Rosenblum

Professor of Law, McGill University Faculty of Law
Reva Siegel

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Kate Shaw

Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School