Obergefell v. Hodges: Five Years Later

Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination – Obergefell vs Hodges. Photo Creator: Ted Eytan

On June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court of the United States issued its momentous opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.  Only a few SCOTUS decisions have provoked such strong debate over the majority’s arguments and its understanding of human dignity or the nature of judicial power.  In this blog conversation, American and European legal scholars and lawyers reflect on the postmodern understanding of marriage that inspired the decision and on the consequences of Obergefell for promotion of LGBTI-people’s rights, on religious exemptions, on democracy in the United States, on children’s rights, on the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence, and on the search for the compromise between religious freedom and anti-discrimination claims. This variety of reflections, both positive and critical, illustrates how the decision has become an important episode in American and global legal and human rights history. (more…)

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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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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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