It is in these cases that strict scrutiny is invoked.
When a statute discriminates on the basis of any of these traits, it makes a “suspect classification” about a social group. intrinsic) to an individual’s identity and not controllable at will. Certain traits, including race and ethnicity, are called “suspect classes” or “suspect classifications” because they are immutable (i.e. The highest standard is the strict scrutiny test, where the state must prove a “compelling interest” for treating members of a specific social group differently from other social groups. Since the late 1930s, the Court has utilized various tests to conduct such evaluations. When deciding whether to strike down a discriminatory statute, the Supreme Court typically has weighed the rights of a citizen against the interests of the state. Without this amendment, the Court will continue to evaluate sex-discrimination cases without a steady metric, thereby leaving problems of inequality unsolved. Therefore, in order to consistently enforce gender equality under the law, the United States must adopt the ERA. Furthermore, legal precedents for these claims remain inconsistent: the Court has continually changed the test it uses to evaluate claims of sex-discrimination, leading to some discriminatory statutes being upheld, while other similar statutes have been struck down. Richardson relied on the implicit assumption that women fell into the category of “persons” that were granted “equal protection of the law.” Grounded in the Court’s “interpretive authority” rather than explicit constitutional protections, claims challenging sex-discrimination thus remain vulnerable, especially in an era of a divided Supreme Court that disagrees on what this implicit assumption should mean and whether to accept it at all.
In order to understand its continued importance, it is essential to note that the Fourteenth Amendment makes no explicit mention of sex. The amendment, however, continues to be relevant. Since the Nineteenth Amendment legitimizes women’s role in public affairs and the Fourteenth Amendment grants equal protection for all persons, one might question the necessity of the ERA. Richardson (1973), a case that challenged the denial of family benefits to female service members, then-attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that “discriminatory sex-based classifications” violated the equal protection clause. Without the ERA, litigation challenging sex discrimination primarily grounded its arguments in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the law” to all “persons born or naturalized in the United States.” For instance, in Frontiero v. Yet, with a sustained campaign against it in the late 1970s and 1980s, the ERA failed to meet the required threshold of thirty-eight state ratifications. For the next fifty years, the ERA was unsuccessfully brought before Congress, eventually securing approval from the House and the Senate in 1972. In 1923, suffragist Alice Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would explicitly ban discrimination on the basis of sex and codify equality between women and men in the law. This unresolved issue of legal equality was not lost on the women’s rights advocates of the 1920s. However, while this amendment legitimized women’s presence in the public sphere, it did not fully grant them equal rights within it. By enshrining, for both sexes, the right to vote, the Nineteenth Amendment formally recognized that women do indeed have a role in making political, legal, social, and economic decisions. This amendment began a decades-long process of enfranchising women across the country. This year, the United States celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification.
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