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 ∙ Director, ERA Project

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.

Melissa Murray ∙ Faculty Director, BWLC

Melissa Murray, Faculty Director of the BWLC, is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU. Professor Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal and earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar. Following law school, Professor Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

Professor Murray teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice, and her research focuses on the legal regulation of sex and sexuality and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the marriage equality debate, the legal recognition of caregiving, and reproductive rights and justice. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. Professor Murray is also an author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary (with Andrew Weissmann), as well as Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice (with Kristin Luker), the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice. She has also written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Huffington Post, and has offered commentary for NPR, MSNBC, and PBS, among other media outlets. She is, with two other law professors, a co-founder and co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a Crooked Media podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.

In 2010, Professor Murray was awarded the Association of American Law Schools’ Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. Professor Murray was previously on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf ∙ Executive Director, BWLC

Attorney and author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf joined the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center in 2022 as executive director. Prior she was vice president and the inaugural women and democracy fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. She also leads partnerships and strategy at Ms., the feminist movement-making magazine. A passionate writer on and advocate for issues of gender and politics, Jennifer was dubbed the “architect of the U.S. campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek. She has presented on issues related to her area of expertise — menstruation, menopause, and the law — at the White House and before Congress, as well as in state legislatures and major city governmental bodies; she works closely with domestic and global leaders, advocates, and innovators in pursuing policy reforms.

Her 2017 book Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity was lauded by Gloria Steinem as “the beginning of liberation for us all.” She is a contributor to and editor of 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution (Knopf, 2023). She authored the 2025 Citizen’s Guide To Menopause Advocacy, featuring a foreword from advocate and journalist Maria Shriver; she is now writing a book inspired by the Citizen’s Guide to be published by Hachette US (Sheldon Press) in 2026. Jennifer’s scholarship and writing have been published by the NYU Review of Law and Social Change; Columbia Journal of Gender and Law; and William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Her writing and work have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Oprah Daily, NPR, PBS, and MSNBC.com, among others. She is also a regular contributor at the popular Substack, The Contrarian.

Jennifer received her JD from Cardozo Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, and her BA in government from Lafayette College.

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, New York Law School
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 T.H. Chan 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