Law Commons^™

The Ninth Circuit's Perry Decision And The Constitutional Politics Of Marriage Equality, William N. Eskridge

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Perry v. Brown, the Ninth Circuit ruled that California’s Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause. Reacting to the state supreme court’s recognition of marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples, Proposition 8 was a 2008 voter initiative that altered the state constitution to “restore” the “traditional” understanding of civil marriage to exclude same-sex couples. The major theme of the Yes-on-Eight campaign was that the state should not deem lesbian and gay unions to be “marriages” because schoolchildren would then think that lesbian and gay relationships are just as good as straight “marriages.”

Proposition 8 intended that gay …

Love As Legal Methodology: Comments On Love In A Time Of Envy, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In academic papers about emotion, it is not uncommon to find a kind of disconnect between the detachment of theoretical and scholarly language and the subject of the paper--the emotions. One of the lovely, and challenging, aspects of Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller's article is that it not only conveys the emotions that are its subject, but it brims with its own emotion; it reads like a text written out of shattered love. Goldberg-Hiller takes up Jean-Luc Nancy's contention that "love is shattered by its very essence. It fragments the self at the same time as it refracts into many forms." Goldberg-Hiller understands …

A Marriage Is A Marriage Is A Marriage: The Limits Of Perry V. Brown, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Perry v. Brown, authored by Judge Reinhardt, has been widely lauded by marriage equality proponents for its creative minimalism. In keeping with commentators’ expectations, the court found a way to determine that California’s Proposition 8 violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, namely that the provision took away an entitlement that had previously been enjoyed by same-sex couples—the right to the appellation of one’s partnership as a “marriage”—for no rational reason. The people of California’s categorization and differential treatment of same-sex couples as compared with opposite-sex couples, the court held, failed the test of …