On Monday, the ERA Project hosted Julie Goldscheid and Victoria Nourse for a discussion on the upcoming Supreme Court case “United States v. Rahimi” and the stakes of the case.

As part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the ERA Project highlighted the Supreme Court case United States v. Rahimi and discussed the role of law in gender-based violence in a webinar event on Monday. The ERA Project is a law and policy group started in 2021 by Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law that gathers experts from around the country to develop research and strategies for ensuring the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) into the US Constitution as well as advancing gender justice in the US. The discussion, moderated by ERA Project Policy Associate Naomi Young, featured two ERA Project Academic Advisory Council members, Julie Goldscheid and Victoria Nourse, and examined the stakes and potential effects of the Rahimi case in relation to the legal system’s handling of gender-based violence.

Young began the event by providing a brief overview of the case, headed to the Supreme Court on November 7. United States v. Rahimi asks whether a federal law that prohibits the possession of firearms by people with domestic violence protection orders violates the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms. As a former senior staff attorney at Her Justice, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal help to women in poverty in New York City, Young stressed the importance of this case for its potential life-or-death impacts on victims of domestic violence, as she saw first-hand how these domestic violence protection orders were crucial to the safety of her clients.

Young also began the conversation by highlighting the shortcomings of domestic violence protection orders. As a remedy to domestic violence that centers on the criminal justice system, this form of protection may not be enough to protect women of color who are often treated unequally in the criminal justice system. As such, Young emphasized the need for the ERA to reorient legal systems’ responses to gender-based violence through an intersectional approach.

Young then introduced Julie Goldscheid, a Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law whose scholarship focuses on gender violence and economic equality. Goldscheid started with the question of what gun regulation has to do with gender equality, answering, in short, “A lot.” Highlighting some of the statistics that the ERA Project has compiled thus far, she argued that gun ownership has a gendered nature that contributes to the urgency of this case. Men are statistically more likely to own guns, and gun lobby marketing often equates gun usage to images of masculinity, both of which place women, who experience domestic violence at about twice the rates of men, in danger of gun violence. 

Goldscheid used these statistics to demonstrate gender violence’s inextricable link to gender discrimination, which she sees play out in the stereotypes and bias often imposed on survivors. To exemplify her argument, Goldscheid stated that in the previous run of United States v. Rahimi in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Circuit Judge James Ho engaged with these gender stereotypes while explaining his vote on the case. He denied the advantages of protective orders for survivors, claiming that they often lie about the abuse they’ve been subjected to in order to gain financial advantages. Goldscheid also underscored the difficulties that these gender biases place on survivors who try to obtain protection orders against their abusers, a challenge that Judge Ho denied in court as well. Ultimately, Goldscheid argued that the US’s current legal frameworks “allow these gendered assumptions … to remain invisible,” calling for more effective steps toward remedying gender violence and bias in the law. 

After Goldscheid’s discussion on the case’s importance, Young asked Victoria Nourse, the Ralph v. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown Law, to contextualize the Supreme Court case in terms of the US’s legal background with gender-based violence and gun violence. Nourse explained that United States v. Rahimi is an example of originalism, a theory of interpreting legal texts that favors interpreting these texts, particularly the US Constitution, by their original meaning at the time they were written. In reference to the Constitution as interpreted by originalism, Nourse remarked that “most of the rights [women] think [they] have are now dependent on history,” which, for quite some time, did not guarantee women’s rights. 

Linking originalism to the current Supreme Court case, Nourse explained that certain justices have degraded the domestic violence protections for survivors using historical court cases’ decisions. In particular, the decision on the 2000 Supreme Court case United States v. Morrison, which invalidated an act that allowed gender violence victims to sue their attackers in federal court, makes it difficult for victims today to sue in response to gender violence. Morrison and, now, Rahimi illustrate a history of judges heavily questioning the existence of domestic violence and downgrading survivors’ accounts.

Tying this historical background to the importance of the ERA, Nourse explained that because of Morrison, the federal government cannot pass the “civil rights remedy” that would help survivors’ difficulties in obtaining protective orders. With this imposed limit, the ERA must be advanced to protect women from gender violence under the law. 

In light of the somber history and current state of women’s legal protections from instances of gender violence, Young pivoted the conversation by asking Goldscheid and Nourse to imagine reorienting the legal system on the principle of gender equality. Goldscheid suggested that we shift our thinking on how to acknowledge and answer to gender violence. Instead of framing the criminal legal system as a solution, she offered alternative responses that legislators can consider, including laws that address the economic impacts of intimate partner violence and the need for material resources, social services, and childcare. While these solutions may not apply to every case, Goldscheid believes that they can help many survivors and prevent future violence. 

Young closed the discussion on Rahimi and gender-based violence with a statement of gratitude for the current ERAs that have been enacted in state laws. Although they only operate at the state level, Young was optimistic about their potential effects on women across the nation. With state ERAs in place, Young hopes that legislators can “reimagin[e] what responses to gender-based violence should look like,” responses that Young, Goldscheid, and Nourse all demonstrated are crucial to the protection of women against gender-based violence under the law.

Columbia Law School via Columbia Law