Thursday, March 28, 2013

On the Gay Marriage Case

Writer Courtney Milan, who's a lawyer in her day job IIRC, wrote this seriously awesome summary of Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments in the Gay Marriage case, in transcript form. They're nowhere near done, but this is interesting and humorous and well worth reading. Probably a lot moreso, for most of us, than the actual transcript (which is 82 pages long) although she links to that if you want to tackle it.

Oral argument starts with Charles Cooper speaking on behalf of the petitioners, who are not in favor of same-sex marriage in California.

COOPER: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. Today, we—

ROBERTS: In keeping with the practices of this Court, we don’t allow anyone to complete a full sentence before interrupting them. Tell us why the people who hired you should even be allowed to bring a case.

COOPER: Because California said so.

GINSBURG: So? We’ve said before that in order to be able to bring a federal case, you have to have an injury in fact, something that is specific to you.

COOPER: But these people were injured. They didn’t want gay people to marry, and now look! Gays. Lesbians. Able to marry at will. It’s very injurious. They’re injured just thinking about it.

Click through to read the rest.

She also summarized the next chunk, which is shorter but still has some good ??? stuff in it. She says she's not going to do any more, which is a shame, seriously.

Angie

4 comments:

Suzan Harden said...

Personally, I liked Justice Ginsburg's whole milk/skim milk analogy.

And I don't remember any previous versions of the Supremes being this funny. At least, not when I was in law school.

Angie said...

Suzan -- yes, it's entertainingly on point. Especially when you consider it's the "defense of marriage" crowd who are arguing for skim. [eyeroll]

Angie

Charles Gramlich said...

Perhaps it really happened just this way.

Angie said...

Charles -- that would be awesome, and I'd totally read the complete transcript. :D

Angie