HARVARD LAW PROFS FILE IN SUPPORT OF GOODRIDGE, AGAINST CIVIL UNIONS COMPROMISE: From the Harvard Crimson

A group of 90 law professors and constitutional scholars from across the country, including 18 from Harvard Law School (HLS), urged the state’s highest court Monday to solidify its November ruling on gay marriage by rejecting a proposed civil union law.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, which was written by Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe '62, the group argues that the Nov. 18 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was unambiguous in its conclusion that the state must allow homosexual couples to marry.

"I thought it was important, as did a large number of the best constitutional law scholars and legal historians in the country, to weigh in on whether there really is any ambiguity," Tribe said. "I thought it was clear that there wasn’t any." ...

The brief argues that any "retreat" from the November ruling would "risk gratuitously exposing the SJC to withering critique for having first taken a courageous and principled stand on a matter going to the core of both liberty and equality--but having then turned around and responded equivocally, at best, to the question whether the SJC actually meant what it had so recently said." ...

...The deans of Yale and Stanford Law Schools joined several professors from HLS and other top law schools in signing the brief. ...

In a statement on the HLS website, Tribe said he hopes the brief will make the SJC "sit up and listen," noting that experts "spanning the ideological spectrum" signed the brief.

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posted by Eve at 1:07 AM | link

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