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Posts Tagged ‘Douglas Hallward-Driemeier’

Supreme Court May Address Parental Presumption for Children of Married Lesbians This Term

Posted on: November 26th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

Now that there is a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it is possible that the Court will begin a process of cutting back on marriage equality.  This is at least one interpretation of the Court’s request for additional briefing on a cert petition filed by the state of Indiana in Box v. Henderson, No. 19-1385, seeking review of the 7th Circuit’s January 17, 2020, decision in Henderson v. Box, 947 F.3d 482, in which the court of appeals applied the Supreme Court’s rulings in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) and Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (2017), to rule that a state must apply the parental presumption regarding newborn children regardless of the sex of the birth mother’s spouse, if it always applies the presumption when the birth mother’s spouse is male.

When the petition was filed with the Court in June, the Respondents (same-sex mothers challenging the state’s policy) waived their right to file a response, apparently assuming that the Court would not be interested in revisiting an issue that it had decided per curiam with only three dissenting votes as recently as June 2017.   The petition was circulated to the justices for their conference of September 29, which would be held the week after the death on September 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was part of the Pavan v. Smith majority.  Another member of that majority who is no longer on the Court is Anthony M. Kennedy, whose retirement led to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment.  By the time the Court was to hold its conference on  the 29th, it was clear that Trump would nominate a conservative replacement for Ginsburg and that the Senate would rush to confirm the nominee to fulfil Trump’s goal to ensure a 6-3 Republican conservative majority on the Court in case he sought to contest adverse election results.

Evidently the Box v. Henderson petition, lacking a responsive filing, caught the eyes of one or more of the conservative justices, who had the Clerk of the Court send a request to the plaintiffs to file a responding brief, which was filed on November 10.  On November 23, the state of Indiana filed a Reply brief, which provided a news hook for media to report on November 24 that the new conservative majority might take up the case as a vehicle to cut back on marriage equality by holding that a state may decide that it is not required to presume that the wife of a birth mother is the other parent for purposes of officially recording the birth.

An argument that has been persuasive to lower courts, apart from the “equal treatment” for same-sex marriages statements in Obergefell and Pavan, is that states have applied the presumption in favor of the husbands of birth mothers even when it was clear that the husband was not the biological father, as for example when donor sperm was used to inseminate the wife with the husband’s consent, or when the husband and wife were geographically separated when the wife became pregnant.  Thus, under existing policies in many states, the parental presumption has not been limited to cases in which it was rational to assume that the birth mother’s husband was the child’s biological father.  In this connection, even if Chief Justice Roberts, part of the per curiam majority in Pavan despite his dissent in Obergefell, sticks with his vote in Pavan, there are now five conservatives to vote the other way, two of whom joined Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in Pavan asserting that the issue was not decided simply on the basis of Obergefell.

With the filing of the state’s reply brief, the Petition has been redistributed for the Court’s conference of December 11.  Sometimes the Court rolls over cert Petitions for many conferences before reaching a decision whether to grant review.  If the Court grants certiorari before the end of January, the case would likely be argued during the current term and decided by the end of June. A later grant would most likely be argued during the October 2021 Term.

Counsel listed on the Respondents’ Brief in Opposition include Karen Celestino-Horseman (Counsel of Record) of Austin & Jones, P.C., Indianapolis; attorneys from the National Center for Lesbian Rights (Catherine Sakimura, Shannon Minter, and Christopher Stoll), San Francisco; Douglas Hallward-Driemeier of Ropes & Gray LLP, Washington (who was one of the oral advocates in the Obergefell case); Joshua E. Goldstein, also of Ropes & Gray LLP, Boston office; Raymond L. Faust, of Norris Choplin Schroeder LLP, Indianapolis, William R. Groth of Vlink Law Firm LLC, Indianapolis; and Richard Andrew Mann and Megal L. Gehring, of Mann Law, P.C., Indianapolis.  Several same-sex couples joined in this case, resulting in several Indianapolis law firms being involved.

NCLR Seeks Supreme Court Review of Arkansas Birth Certificate Decision

Posted on: February 15th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on February 13, seeking review of the Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision that the state was not required under Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), to extend the presumption of parentage to the same-sex spouse of a birth mother for purposes of recording parentage on a birth certificate. Smith v. Pavan, 2016 WL 7156529 (Ark. December 8, 2016), petition for certiorari filed sub nom. Pavan v. Smith, No. 16-992.

The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision, by a sharply divided court with three strong dissenting opinions, was the first ruling on this question to depart from a post-Obergefell consensus of courts in other jurisdictions that equal marriage rights for same-sex couples necessarily include the equal right to have a spouse recorded as a parent on a birth certificate, despite the lack of a “biological” tie to the child, especially in light of the common practice of automatically recognizing a birth mother’s husband for that purpose, regardless whether he is “biologically related” to the child.

The due process and equal protection issues raised by the Arkansas court’s decision are stark, raising the possibility that the Supreme Court might consider this an appropriate case for a summary reversal, similar to its decision last term to summarily reverse the Alabama Supreme Court’s refusal to accord full faith and credit to a same-sex second parent adoption approved by a Georgia family court in V.L. v. E.L., 136 S. Ct. 1017 (March 7, 2016).  In V.L. the Court moved quickly to reverse the state supreme court ruling based on the certiorari filings, seeing no need for full briefing and hearing on the merits.  That ruling was announced several weeks after the death of Justice Scalia by the eight-member Court, and brought no dissent from any justices, three of whom had dissented in Obergefell.  They implicitly agreed that with Obergefell as a precedent, there was no justification for recognizing any exception to the general rule that adoption decrees are to be recognized when the court granting the adoption clearly had jurisdiction over the parties and the subject matter of the adoption petition.  They rejected the Alabama Supreme Court’s reliance on its own interpretation of the Georgia adoption statute as withholding “jurisdiction” from the family court to grant such an adoption.

NCLR petitioned on behalf of two married same-sex couples – Marisa and Terrah Pavan and Leigh and Jana Jacobs. Each couple had married out of state and then, living in Arkansas, had a child conceived through donor insemination.  In both cases, the mothers completed the necessary paper work to get a birth certificate when their children were born.  In both cases, the state health department issued a certificate naming only the birth mother and leaving the space for “father” blank on the birth certificate rather than naming the other mother.  The state insisted that under its statute the automatic listing was limited to a husband of the birth mother.

The women filed suit against the director of the state health department, Dr. Nathaniel Smith, seeking to compel issuance of appropriate birth certificates, together with another couple who were not married when they had their child but who subsequently married after the Obergefell decision and sought an amended birth certificate.  That other couple is no longer in the case, having gone through an adoption proceeding and obtained a new birth certificate naming both mothers.  The Arkansas state trial court construed Obergefell and its own marriage equality decision, Wright v. Smith, to require according equal recognition to same-sex marriages for this purpose, and ordered the state to issue amended birth certificates accordingly.  The trial court refused to stay its decision pending appeal, so the certificates were issued.

The Arkansas Supreme Court reversed, even though the state conceded at oral argument that in light of its statute requiring that a husband be listed on a birth certificate regardless whether he was biologically related to the child the state’s position was inconsistent with its own practice. Indeed, the state conceded at oral argument that it had no rational basis for treating same-sex and different-sex spouses differently for this purpose.  However, the state insisted that it was refusing to list same-sex spouses consistent with its gender-specific statute because the birth certificate was necessary to establish the identity of biological parents for public health reasons.  This was a patently absurd argument in light of the various circumstances under Arkansas law where non-biological fathers are listed on birth certificates.

The dissenting judges pointed in various ways to the Obergefell decision, which actually listed birth certificates as one of the issues related to marital rights that helped explain why the right to marry was a fundamental right.  Furthermore, as the certiorari petition points out in detail, the very question raised by this case was specifically part of the Obergefell case, as the underlying state cases that were consolidated into the appeal argued at the 6th Circuit and the Supreme Court included plaintiffs who were married lesbian couples seeking to have appropriate birth certificates for their children.  In those cases, the certificates had been denied by states that refused to recognize the validity of the mothers’ out-of-state marriages.  Thus, the Supreme Court’s reference to birth certificates was part of the issue before the Court, not merely illustrative of the reasons why the Court deemed the right to marry fundamental, and in holding that states were required to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other states, the Court was incidentally addressing the refusal of states in the cases before the Court to recognize petitioners’ marriages for purposes of recording the names of parents on birth certificates!

Thus, the Arkansas Supreme Court majority was clearly wrong in asserting that the Obergefell decision did not address this issue and pertained only to the question whether same-sex couples had a right to marry.  Given biological facts, lesbian couples having children through donor insemination are exactly similarly situated with different-sex couples having children through donor insemination, as in both cases the spouse of the birth mother is not the biological parent of the child.  By the logic of Obergefell, denial of such recognition and marital rights offends both due process and equal protection guarantees of the 14th Amendment.  And, as the Petition points out, such denial relegates same-sex marriages to a “second tier” treatment, which was condemned by the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013), when it ruled that the federal government was required to extend equal recognition to same-sex marriages validly contracted under state laws.  In both cases, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the inability of same-sex lesbian couples to conceive children without a sperm donor provided a rational basis to deny recognition to their marriages or treat them differently from the marriages of heterosexual couples.

NCLR attorneys on the Petition including Legal Director Shannon Minter and staff attorneys Christopher Stoll and Amy Whelan. Arkansas attorney Cheryl Maples is listed as local counsel.  Cooperating Attorneys from Ropes & Gray LLP (Washington and Boston offices) on the Petition include Molly Gachignard, Christopher Thomas Brown, Justin Florence, Joshua Goldstein and Daniel Swartz, with prominent R&G partner Douglas Hallward-Driemeier as Counsel of Record for the case.  Hallward-Driemeier successfully argued the marriage recognition issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges.  GLAD attorney Mary Bonauto from Boston argued the right to marry issue in Obergefell.