The newest issue of the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty is available online. It contains their special Supreme Court Review-Preview, which in turn contains my short article, Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage after Windsor, which I’ve mentioned here before. It begins: Last June, the headlines said that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States […]
Archive | Conflict of Laws
The Limited(?) Nature of the Ohio Same-Sex Marriage Decision
Like Jonathan (posting directly below) I saw a lot of early reports suggesting that Judge Black, in the Southern District of Ohio, had invalidated Ohio’s ban on same-sex marriage. But Chris Geidner has a link to the actual decision, and as a technical matter it is slightly more limited: it invalidates Ohio’s ban as applied […]
The Aurora Mass Shooting, Choice of Law, and Newsgatherer Shield Statutes
Reporter, who is based in New York, gathers information in Colorado, related to a Colorado crime. She returns to New York, but is subpoenaed to appear in Colorado court proceedings, to testify about her confidential sources. Should New York newsgatherer shield law or Colorado newsgatherer shield law apply? An interesting and unusual choice of law […]
Murder Prosecution Raises Multiple Same-Sex Marriage Recognition Questions
A current murder prosecution in Kentucky happens to simultaneously raise two different same-sex-marriage recognition problems that I’ve previously blogged about. In Kentucky, as in many states, spouses don’t have to testify against one another about things they said while married. Ms. Bobby Jo Clary is on trial for murder, and the state wants her partner, […]
New Labor Guidance on Same-Sex Marriage and ERISA
Thanks to the indispensable Chris Geidner, I see that the Department of Labor has issued “guidance” about how to deal with same-sex marriages under ERISA. Like just about every federal agency other than the Social Security Administration, the labor department takes the view that a marriage is valid for federal purposes if it was valid […]
Does Windsor Require States to Recognize Out-of-State Same-Sex Marriages?
I’ve blogged before about Obergefell v. Kasich, the first post-Windsor decision to raise the very interesting question of whether states are required to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages. I’ve now written a short essay on that question, which is forthcoming in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty’s inaugural Supreme Court Review-Preview. Here is the introduction: […]
IRS Will Recongize Same-Sex Marriages Regardless of Where Couples Reside
Today the Treasury department announced that it will recognize all same-sex marriages valid in the “place of celebration” regardless of where the couple now lives. This is particularly noteworthy because it seems like a policy change. It had generally been thought that the IRS deals with other questions of marital validity by looking to residence. […]
Social Security Administration Takes Different View of Marital Choice of Law
Chris Geidner (my go-to source these days for post-DOMA legal developments) reports that the Social Security Administration has now developed policies for paying benefits to couples in same-sex marriages. Most interestingly, the SSA has bucked the trend in other executive agencies of paying benefits to all couples whose marriage was validly celebrated. Instead, the SSA […]
Steve Sanders on The Obligation to Recognize Out-of-State Marriages
IU Law Professor Steve Sanders has a post on the ACS Blog discussing Obergefell v. Kasich, the S.D. Ohio decision I blogged about earlier that required Ohio to recognize a marriage from Maryland — a marriage performed on a jet that had touched down in Maryland for the ceremony. Sanders is quite critical of the […]
Civil Unions and Federal Law
A commenter to my last DOMA/choice-of-law post asks– why not just have federal law recognize all state-law civil unions? Why insist that a legal union be labeled “marriage” to count federally as a marriage? There are two slightly different versions of this question, which in my view have different answers. Version one: Under current law, […]
Cozen O’Connor v. Tobits: A Questionable Resolution of Some Complicated Choice of Law Problems
Thanks to the ever-alert Chris Geidner, I saw this post-DOMA decision by a federal district court in Pennsylvania, which is a good example of how complicated the post-DOMA choice-of-law problems can be (and how hard it is to get them right). The case is an interpleader action dealing with ERISA problems (bear with me!) arising […]
Federal Court Orders Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage
As readers of the VC all surely know, the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Windsor struck down Section 3 of DOMA, which restricts the recognition of marriage for purposes of federal statutes. One of the big unanswered questions after Windsor was what would happen to Section 2 of DOMA, and more generally the question […]