In Re Marriage Cases

47 Cal.4th 757 (2008)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Eventually, the California Attorney General and a number of taxpayers filed two separate petitions seeking to have this court issue an original writ of mandate, asserting that the City's actions were unlawful and warranted our immediate intervention. The City filed a writ petition and complaint for declaratory relief in superior court, seeking a declaration that all California statutory provisions limiting marriage to unions between a man and a woman violate the California Constitution. The Lockyer case concluded that the City officials had exceeded their authority in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the absence of a judicial determination that the statutory provisions limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman are unconstitutional, and further concluding that the approximately 4,000 same-sex marriages performed in San Francisco prior to our March 11, 2004, order were void and of no legal effect. Meanwhile, the superior court proceeded expeditiously to solicit briefing and conduct a hearing on the validity, under the California Constitution, of California's statutes limiting marriage to a man and a woman. The superior court determined that the statutes limiting marriage in California to opposite-sex couples properly must be evaluated under the strict scrutiny equal protection standard because those statutory enactments rest upon a suspect classification (sex) and impinge upon a fundamental constitutional right (the right to marry). The court held that California's current marriage statutes are unconstitutional under the state Constitution insofar as they limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. The superior court entered judgment in favor of plaintiffs in each of the coordinated cases. On appeal, the Court of Appeal, in a two-to-one decision, reversed the superior court's ruling on the substantive constitutional issue, disagreeing in a number of significant respects with the lower court's analysis of the equal protection issue. The California Supreme Court granted certiorari.

The state maintains that so long as it affords a couple all of the constitutionally protected substantive incidents of marriage, the state does not violate the couple's constitutional right to marry simply by assigning their official relationship a name other than marriage. The state maintains that California's current domestic partnership legislation affords same-sex couples all of the core substantive rights that plausibly may be guaranteed to an individual or couple as elements of the fundamental state constitutional right to marry, and that its current California statutory scheme relating to marriage and domestic partnership does not violate the fundamental constitutional right to marry embodied in the California Constitution.