A Religious Right organization is urging a federal court in California to invalidate the 2010 decision striking the state’s anti-gay marriage law, Proposition 8, because the judge who issued that opinion is gay, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The newspaper notes, “In a court filing, the sponsors of the ban on gay marriage, ProtectMarriage, asked the chief judge of the federal court in San Francisco to nullify last August’s ruling by former U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who retired earlier this year.”
The group’s filing
states, “Judge Walker’s 10-year-long same-sex relationship creates the unavoidable impression that he was not the impartial judge the law requires.”
SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston provides analysis of the group’s filing and link to it. He writes that the filing is the “latest effort by the measure’s supporters to challenge Judge Walker; they have pending in the Circuit Court a request to block any further public release of the videotape of the trial in his court, contending he has wrongly made public portions of that recording, which is now under seal after the Supreme Court blocked public broadcasting of the trial itself.”
In post for Legal Ethics Forum, University of Minnesota Law School Professor Richard W. Painter, the former White House Chief Ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, took issue with a couple of bloggers who also charged that Judge Walker should not have heard the Prop. 8 case.
“The absurdity of this claim is obvious,” Painter wrote. “The mere fact that a judge belongs to a class of persons affected by a case does not require recusal.”
In other events regarding the struggle to advance marriage equality, The New York Times reports on one of the nation’s largest law firms, King & Spalding, and its decision to step away from defending the anti-gay law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), in court. Since the Obama administration announced earlier this year that it would stop defending the law in court, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives turned to outside counsel to defend the law, and tapped King & Spalding attorney Paul D. Clement.
Clement, a former U.S. Solicitor General in the Bush administration, resigned from the law firm yesterday after it decided to drop the case. Clement, the newspaper reports, will represent the Republicans’ argument against DOMA as a partner at Bancroft PLLC.
Announcing his resignation from King & Spalding, Clement said, “Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do.”
King & Spalding Chairman Robert D. Hayes Jr. said in a statement that the firm inadequately vetted the case and should not have agreed to take it. The Times noted a clause in the House contract that barred the “firm’s lawyers from any advocacy for or against bills that would or repeal the marriage act.”
Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, lauded King & Spalding for dumping the case.
“In America, every person deserves a defense, but not every position does,” Wolfson said in a press statement. “King & Spalding has recognized what President Obama, the Department of Justice, and many members of Congress have joined Freedom to Marry in concluding: federal marriage discrimination and the so-called ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ are indefensible.”
A bipartisan group of former senior Department of Justice attorneys and other federal prosecutors recently lodged an