Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

Opinion here. Next up, the California Supreme Court. And we’re still awaiting a decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court.

I’ll be in Seattle on Monday speaking on a panel entitled, “The Defense of Marriage Act Decision: The State of Same-Sex Marriage After Andersen v. King County.” Also on the panel will be lawyers representing the contending sides, Steven O’Ban (pro-DOMA) and Bradley Bagshaw (anti-DOMA). The moderator will be David Postman, a political reporter and […]

can be found here. All of us at VC have done 0. I hope we’ve avoided 1, but I’m not sure. Most student note work is 2 or 3, but so is a lot of professors’ work. I’ve mostly done 4 through 6, with forays into 7 and limited incursions into 8. Competent 9 and […]

Read it here. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, is a prominent judicial conservative. The occasion for this particular op-ed is the sweeping Virginia state constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall. Proponents of the amendment say that states need protection from activist judges in […]

Two more response are now available to Professor Robert George’s argument that there is no objection to polygamy “as a matter of principle” once gay marriage is accepted. Philosophy professor John Corvino writes: The issue is whether being a gay-rights advocate inherently “entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two […]

David Link, an attorney who has worked in the California legislature for eight years and has written for Reason and the L.A. Times, has followed the recent exchange among Professor Robert George, Jon Rauch, Maggie Gallagher, and me over gay marriage and polygamy. He has emailed me his thoughts on some practical differences between recognizing […]

Franklin Kameny was, as they say, a pioneer of the early days of the modern gay civil rights movement. Before even the Stonewall riot in New York in 1969, in days when 49 of 50 states banned sodomy (and meant it), when the police routinely raided gay bars and arrested patrons for dancing together or […]

I now have a new paper up on SSRN on Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Supreme Court’s decision of last March upholding the constititutionality of the Solomon Amendment. I’d appreciate any constructive comments here or at my law school email address from those who have the time to read the paper.

The district court held that the plaintiffs had standing to challenge the warrantless NSA surveillance program. The plaintiffs are individuals and associations whose members “conducted regular international and telephone and internet communications for various uncontestedly legitimate reasons including journalism, the practice of law, and scholarship.” They asserted a “well founded belief” that they had been […]

Two weeks ago, I posted about an exchange between Professor Robert George and Jon Rauch on gay marriage and polygamy. The exchange between them was prompted by a recent document signed by hundreds of progressive academics and activists calling for health care and jobs for all, universal peace, an end to hunger, and the equal […]

On the heels of the recent judicial losses for same-sex marriage litigants, a group of academics and activists issued a manifesto entitled “Beyond Marriage” that basically repeats the things they’ve been saying for decades about family policy: Gay marriage is not their cause because they really don’t much like marriage at all. Marriage should not […]

For gay-marriage litigants, July has been the cruelest month. Prior to today’s 5-4 Washington Supreme Court decision in Andersen v. King County, there were two substantive state marriage decisions against them (New York and Connecticut), one quasi-substantive federal decision against them (the 8th Circuit, whose broad dicta went beyond the state constitutional ban at issue), […]

Over the objections of four dissenters, the court turned away a state constitutional challenge to Washington’s marriage law. Here’s a summary of the holding from the opinion itself: In brief, unless a law is a grant of positive favoritism to a minority class, we apply the same constitutional analysis under the state constitution’s privileges and […]

From Andrew Sullivan, a YouTube video showing a deposition that got out of hand. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but from the looks of these excerpts the deposition-taker and at least one of his allies should have been sanctioned. Any readers know what actually happened in the (likely) motions and cross-motions afterwards? UPDATE: […]

The University of Minnesota Law School’s alumni magazine has just published a debate between my colleagues Professors Michael Paulsen and Heidi Kitrosser, and me, on the constitutionality of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program. Professor Paulsen, a noted and prolific advocate of expansive executive authority, argues that the program is constitutional; Professor Kitrosser and I disagree. […]