By Jenny Horn

The ERA Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality has a small but mighty team of staff doing the behind-the-scenes work. But we’re lucky enough to also have the support of an experienced, enthusiastic Board of Directors, Advisory Council, and Legal Task Force.

Learn a little more about our staff and Board Members on our website, where you can also see the members of our Advisory Council!

And you can learn more about the impressive ERA Coalition Legal Task Force right here:

Linda Coberly, Chair
Winston & Strawn LLP

Linda Coberly is the managing partner of Winston & Strawn LLP’s Chicago office and serves on the firm’s Executive Committee. She is a partner in the firm’s Litigation Department and chairs its Appellate and Critical Motions Practice. Drawing upon her experience as a law clerk to Justice Stephen G. Breyer on the Supreme Court and Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg on the D.C. Circuit, a significant portion of Linda’s practice centers around advising and representing clients in regard to U.S. Supreme Court proceedings. 

Jessica Neuwirth
Hunter College

Jessica Neuwirth is President Emerita of the ERA Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality, and author of Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for the ERA is Now. She is also the Director of Donor Direct Action and a founder of Equality Now. Jessica has worked for Amnesty International and for the United Nations. As Special Advisor on Sexual Violence to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2010, she organized the UN high-level panel on reparations for victims of sexual violence in the DR Congo. She currently serves as the Rita E. Hauser Director of the Human Rights Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College.

Erwin Chemerinsky
Berkeley Law School

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law School, is the author of 14 books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction, such as Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights and The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. Chemerinsky was listed by National Jurist as the most influential person in legal education in the United States in 2017, and was more recently named President-elect of the Association of American Law Schools in January 2021.

Michele Goodwin
UCI Law School

Michele Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is the recipient of the 2020-21 Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center, as the organization central to the founding of bioethics. Her expertise focuses primarily in Bioethics, Constitutional Law, Family Law, Health Law, Reproductive Rights, and Torts.

Catharine MacKinnon
U. Michigan Law School

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law and the long-term James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She specializes in sex equality issues under international and domestic (including comparative, criminal, and constitutional) law, and pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment. Additionally, serving as the first special gender adviser to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (The Hague) from 2008 to 2012, Catharine implemented her concept of “gender crime.”

Carol Robles-Roman
CUNY

Carol Robles-Román is Secretary of the ERA Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality. Carol was previously the President and CEO of Legal Momentum, where she spearheaded legislative, legal and policy efforts to ensure equal rights for women and girls, combated human trafficking and violence against women and protected women’s economic security. Carol was Deputy Mayor for Legal Affairs and Counsel to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg for 12 years. She served as a NYS assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Julie C. Suk
Fordham University School of Law

Suk, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law, is an interdisciplinary legal scholar, focusing on women as constitution-makers at the intersection of law, history, sociology, and politics. Her broader research interests include constitutional and social change; antidiscrimination law and its effects on social inequality; women, work, and family; civil litigation as an enforcement mechanism for public law; access to justice, including the past and future role of nonlawyers in solving the civil justice problems of poor and middle-income people; social, political, and legal theory; and law and literature. 

Kathleen Sullivan
Quinn Emanuel LLP

Kathleen Sullivan is a partner in Quinn Emanuel LLP’s New York and Los Angeles offices, and is the chair of its national appellate practice. Widely recognized as one of the nation’s top appellate advocates, she has been named repeatedly to The National Law Journal’s list of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. She represents a wide range of clients, including Samsung, Shell Oil, Entergy, Google, Cisco, Coca-Cola, AIG, and CNA. She has argued eleven times before the United States Supreme Court; numerous cases in the US Courts of Appeals, including the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth and Federal Circuits; and various cases in state high courts including the New York Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court.

Linda Wharton
Stockton College

A professor at Stockton College, Wharton’s scholarly research and writing focuses on issues of state and federal constitutional law with a special concentration on the law of gender discrimination. Her work has been published in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, the Rutgers Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, the Stanford Law & Policy Review and the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law. She has served as the Managing Attorney of the Women’s Law Project, where she specialized in litigation and law reform relating to gender discrimination. Additionally, she served as co-lead counsel in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a challenge to Pennsylvania’s restrictive abortion law that was heard by the United States Supreme Court in 1992. Finally, she has also served as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Women’s History Project and the Women’s Rights Committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association. 

Robinson Woodward-Burns
Howard University

Robinson Woodward-Burns with Howard University researches American constitutional thought and development, focusing on civil rights, federalism, slavery, abolitionism, and transcendentalism. He has published on American constitutionalism in The Journal of Politics, Polity, The Tulsa Law Review, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. His book, Hidden Laws: How the State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics was published with Yale University Press.