As anticipation builds for the first federal appellate arguments on marriage equality since the Supreme Court’s decision last June striking down the Defense of Marriage Act’s anti-gay federal marriage definition, new developments in marriage equality litigation continue to pile up in various parts of the country.
On Thursday, April 10, a panel of three judges of the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit will hear the state of Utah’s appeal of last … <Read More>
U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia of the Western District of Texas, San Antonio, ruled on February 26 that Texas has shown no rational basis for depriving same-sex couples of the right to marry or for refusing to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Adding yet another brick to the solid wall of federal trial court decisions that has been mounting since last summer, when a judge in Ohio ordered that state to recognize an out-of-state … <Read More>
Yesterday I conducted a faculty workshop at New York Law School on the current status of the struggle for marriage equality in the U.S. To prepare for the workshop and to provide a useful handout for the participants, I spent a few hours putting together a chronology of landmark developments, beginning with the Supreme Court’s statement in 1972 in Baker v. Nelson that a constitutional claim for same-sex marriage did not present a “substantial federal … <Read More>
Claiming that a married lesbian had no need to adopt the child born to her same-sex spouse, Kings County (Brooklyn) Surrogate Court Judge Margarita Lopez Torres refused to entertain her adoption petition in Matter of Seb C-M, NYLJ 1202640083455 (Jan. 6, 2014).
Torres reasoned that under New York’s Marriage Equality Law, same-sex marriages enjoy the same presumptions of parental status that are accorded to different-sex marriages. Thus, a child born to a married woman is … <Read More>
A unanimous three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today in Smithkline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories that a new trial has to be held because Abbott, the defendant in a civil suit involving claims about the pricing of HIV medications, used one of its “peremptory challenges” to exclude a gay man from the jury. The court found that excluding people from a jury because they are gay violates the … <Read More>
On December 20, 2013, US District Judge Shelby ruled in Kitchen v. Herbert that Utah’s constitutional amendment and statutes banning the performance or recognition of same-sex marriages violated the 14th Amendment. He was ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment. Since the state’s motion did not ask him to grant a stay in case his ruling went against them, he didn’t stay his ruling, which culminated in an injunction barring enforcement of the same-sex marriage ban. … <Read More>
This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the following order:
MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2014
ORDER IN PENDING CASE
13A687 HERBERT, GOV. OF UT, ET AL. V. KITCHEN, DEREK, ET AL.
The application for stay presented to Justice Sotomayor and
by her referred to the Court is granted. The permanent
injunction issued by the United States District Court for the
District of Utah, case No. 2:13-cv-217, on December 20, 2013, is
stayed pending final disposition of … <Read More>
Today the attorneys for the plaintiffs in Kitchen v. Herbert, the Utah marriage equality case, filed their opposition with the Supreme Court to the state’s application for a stay of the trial court ruling.
Under the trial court ruling, issued on Dec. 20, same-sex marriages began happening in Utah that date. On December 23, the trial judge, Robert Shelby, denied the state’s motion to stay his ruling pending appeal. Two days later, a panel of … <Read More>
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled today in a unanimous decision in Greigo v. Oliver, Docket No. 34, 306, 2013 WL 6670704, that the state’s marriage law denies same-sex couples the right to marry and thus violates the Equal Protection Clause of the state’s constitution. Wrote Justice Edward L. Chavez for the court: “We hold that the State of New Mexico is constitutionally required to allow same-gender couples to marry and must extend to them … <Read More>
The lack of any big LGBT court decision over the past week or so, together with the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days, explains why I haven’t posted anything on this blog since August. But things have definitely not been standing still in the ongoing marriage equality campaign.
The biggest deal has probably been the gradual rolling out of federal constitutional recognition for same-sex marriages in the wake of U.S. v. Windsor, the June … <Read More>