The Supreme Court, redux
In the spring, the U.S. Supreme Court saved a trio of critical rulings involving same-sex marriage, voting rights, and affirmative action for the final days of its term, and the repercussions from those decisions are still playing out. During a luncheon discussion Thursday at Harvard Law School (HLS) moderated by Dean Martha Minow, four of the School’s constitutional experts deconstructed the decisions and offered the student crowd their thoughts on those rulings. “It was a good term for the Red Sox, a bad term for the Yankees, and a so-so term for gay marriage,” said Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law Michael Klarman, referring (in addition to baseball’s summer) to both the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that was overturned by the court, thereby allowing same-sex married couples access to federal benefits, and the court’s decision to hand the California case banning same-sex marriage back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for...