It’s been 10 years since the California Supreme Court held the state Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to wed. The lead article in the latest edition of the California Supreme Court Historical Society’s newsletter [disclosure: I’m on the Society’s board of directors] is a dramatic and moving first-person account of that historic case — and of other same-sex marriage litigation — by First District, Division Two, Court of Appeal Justice Therese Stewart, who, as San Francisco’s chief deputy city attorney before she was appointed to the bench, successfully argued the case in the Supreme Court. Justice Stewart is openly gay and she married her long-time partner a few months after the court’s same-sex marriage opinion.
The article is a long but compelling read. In it, Justice Stewart recounts how, when first reading the Supreme Court’s opinion, “it was difficult to stanch the flow of emotions within me that resulted from the realization of just how well the Court understood not only our arguments, yet our experiences as people who had been treated as outsiders for most of our lives.” Stewart herself recently served on the Supreme Court in one case as a pro tem justice.
The newsletter also includes these articles:
- Law Walk: A Legal Site-Seeing Tour of Downtown Los Angeles (Part 2)
- Brosnahan v. Eu: How California Law Turned in 1982 to Face Crime Victims at Defendants’ Expense
- Sunday Mornings with Judge Pregerson: A Grandson Remembers
- Book Review: Rose Bird’s “Case”: Anomalous Confluence of Unique Circumstances or Lasting Damage to Judicial Independence?