GayMarriage Covered by the Clause of the US Constitution?Should it B recognized by the states? YES Legal Experts
We are giving you the short answers to the two most important question facing the Supreme Court. If you are interested on the long answer and how we came to that conclusion then here it is also. Any question we will be more than happy to answer. You leave them on the comment section of this media blog. Adam
The challenge of two Hazel Park nurses, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, and their adopted children to Michigan's 2004 voter-approved same-sex marriage ban will be at the center of arguments on same-sex marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. Michigan's Attorney General's Office is defending the ban.
Read all of Freep's continuing coverage on same-sex marriage arguments in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court will likely wait months before announcing their ruling, but there's already wide speculation about what the justices will do. Click here to read some of the most important quotes and questions from Tuesday's oral arguments inside the Supreme Court.
We talked to legal experts as the arguments unfolded during our live blog Tuesday morning and asked each of them for their predictions on how the court will rule.
Here's what they had to say.
Richard Primus, Law Professor, University of Michigan Law School
I think that the Court will probably rule, sometime around the end of June or the beginning of July, that states that license marriages for opposite-sex partners must also license marriage for same-sex partners. Nothing is for sure, of course, but I think that's the most likely outcome.
Steven Winter, Law Professor, Wayne State University Law School
The conventional wisdom at this point is that the Court will rule that marriage equality is required under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Mae Kuykendall, Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law
I think there is some chance that the Court will rest on a yes answer to the second question posed by the Court, which is whether the 14th Amendment requires states to recognize the marriage of same couples that are legally made elsewhere. To do that requires them to decline, for institutional reasons mainly, to say yes to the first question--which makes every state begin issuing same sex marriage licenses. It is the more cautious approach that most commentators are ignoring.
Stephen Henderson, Free Press Editorial Page Editor, who covered the Supreme Court from 2003-2007.
I think the outcome is pretty certain. THe court will side with the couples seeking to get married, and effectively strike down the amendments/laws that ban gay marriage. The only real question is how many votes that will get. I suspect it could be a 6-3 ruling, presumably with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the majority. That's because Roberts was the likeliest vote among the conservatives last fall to refuse to hear a series of cases in which federal courts had already struck down gay marriage bans.
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