At Volokh Conspiracy, Stephen Sachs (Harvard): New Light on the ERA? A long history of amending resolutions with legal effect. From the introduction:
When Congress proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, it specified in its joint resolution (86 Stat. 1523), agreed to by two-thirds of each House, that the ERA would become valid "when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress." Not enough states ratified before the seven years elapsed, or even before the end of a three-year extension that Congress tried to grant by simple majority in 1978. So the ERA is generally thought to be dead.
But since then, a few more legislatures have purported to ratify the Amendment anyway, pushing the total number over three-fourths. So whether the U.S. Constitution currently includes the ERA or not partly depends on whether this "within seven years" limit is legally effective—or whether it's an unconstitutional addition to the two-thirds-and-three-fourths requirements of Article V. …
While looking for something else, I recently came across some material that might shed new light on the ERA's validity. The idea of putting legally operative language in the joint resolution wasn't an invention of the twentieth century, but a long tradition stretching back to 1803 and before. Not only in proposing the Bill of Rights, but also in proposing the Twelfth and the Seventeenth Amendments, Congress included in the amending resolutions crucial terms specifying the effect of the language that would be added and the parts of the Constitution that would be replaced—terms that, as far as I can tell, courts and scholars haven't yet noticed. This tradition offers a better explanation of Congress's powers vis-à-vis proposed amendments than the twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that dominate the modern debate. And it suggests that the ERA really is dead.
Here is Mike Rappaport's useful summary of the constitutional controversy over the ERA, from a couple of years ago: The Controversy about the ERA Amendment Process.
Posted at 6:44 AM