Obergefell, Our Common Humanity, and Putting Children First

 

 

 


Tanner Bean is an Attorney with the law firm Fabian VanCott in Salt Lake City, Utah

Robin Fretwell Wilson is Director, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois System & Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law

However a person viewed marriage equality in the run up to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 United States Supreme Court case that opened marriage to same-sex couples, it showed that marriage matters to Americans. The plaintiffs in Obergefell sought access to marriage on the same grounds as heterosexual couples, for reasons as pedestrian as filing joint taxes (just one of over a thousand statutory benefits of marriage) to those as meaningful as joining their lives in ways that communities and families recognize as significant. (more…)

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Judicial Overreach and Reasonable Accommodation: Some British Reflection on the US Supreme Court Decision in Obergefell v. Hodges


Professor Mark Hill QC is an adjunct professor at Cardiff University, Pretoria University, Notre Dame University Law School, Sydney and King’s College, London; and is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, Atlanta. He practices at the Bar in London and sits as a judge on the Midland Circuit.

The hallmark of good judgments is their brevity. Short sentences promote clarity. The best sentence in Obergefell v. Hodges is written by Chief Justice Roberts. It comprises seven words: “But this Court is not a legislature.” Unfortunately Roberts’s was a dissenting opinion. By a majority of 5:4, the US Supreme Court effectively legislated to permit gay marriage. I am not opposed to same-sex marriage. On the contrary, I am a champion of LGBT+ rights. Nor am I opposed to judicial activism. The common law is the better for the occasional gentle nudge. My unease, viewed from the UK, is with the starkness of the outcome and its failure to accommodate religious sensibilities. As Justice Scalia remarks in his barnstorming dissent,[1] the consequence of the decision was that the people of America lost “the freedom to govern themselves.” (more…)

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Postmodern Marriages for Postmodern Times: The Obergefell Case and the Strasbourg Court’s Jurisprudence


Dr. Eugenia Relaño Pastor is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Germany).

 

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds indecent to object.”
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

 The exclusion of same-sex couples from the right to marry remains a reality in some EU Member States.[1] But increasing recognition of same-sex marriage and/or same-sex registered partnerships by European legislatures as well as national and supranational courts shows a step forward for the rights of same-sex couples.[2]

The United States and Europe have faced a similar divergence of public opinion and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, so similar in fact that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), frequently referred to as the Strasbourg Court, in Oliari and Others v. Italy devoted substantial attention to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. In Oliari, the Strasbourg Court specifically highlighted the following SCOTUS points: (more…)

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