Lawyers Heroes Or Goats In Fight For Marriage Equality?

Though the issue is about marriage equality for same-sex couples, SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein says “[T]his is up to now a story in which lawyers have been the heroes.” But now the Supreme Court is set to rule on whether or not same-sex marriage bans are constitutional, and that ruling “will dictate whether—for the next couple of decades—we should continue to think of the lawyers as the heroes of that movement, or instead as the goats,” Goldstein says. He outlines the recent legal history and the decisions that lawyers in the current case, involving two nurses from Michigan, made to speed the process and ensure a Supreme Court ruling before June. “If they prevail in invalidating same-sex marriage bans, we will know that they brought their clients a massive victory more quickly,” Goldstein writes. “If they fail, we won’t be able to say the result necessarily would have been different if they had been more patient.”