Luckily, the chance that courts will consider the amendment to be ratified is incredibly slim. As written, the ERA proposal expired on March 22, 1979. The Archivist of the US and the Justice Department both agree that the ratification deadline written into the amendment is binding.
“ERA backers have mounted an assault on the integrity of the constitutional amendment process itself, but they are unlikely to succeed,” said Douglas Johnson, director of NRLC’s ERA Project. “In 40 years, not a single federal judge has accepted a single element of the legal claims made by ERA-revival litigants, while 26 federal judges have rebuffed them. In 2021, federal district Judge Rudolph Contreras, appointed by President Obama, ruled that the ERA ratification deadline was valid and that it would have been ‘absurd’ for the Archivist of the U.S. to ignore the fact that the ERA expired decades before actions by the Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia legislatures.”
