By Lyle Denniston
SCOTUSblog
This the fourth and final article in the series explaining the constitutional controversy, now awaiting the Supreme Court’s attention, over same-sex marriage. The Court is scheduled to take its first look at that issue at its private Conference this morning. This article discusses the various options open to the Court for dealing with those cases. As soon as the Court announces any actions on these cases, the blog will report that. The three prior articles in this series can be found here, here, and here.
Analysis
The Supreme Court, facing a series of cases on related issues, usually will pick only some of the cases but do so on a plan that allows for full if not necessarily complete action on all the key points. Last Term, for example, it had a variety of petitions on the constitutionality of the new federal health care law, and carefully selected the cases that raised the issues of most concern to the Justices, but that did not embrace everything that they had been asked to resolve. It did the same thing in 2003 with a collection of cases on campaign finance law. The Justices, it seems likely, will do the same with the ten petitions coming before them this morning on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage.
It also is probable that the Court may hold more than a single hour of argument on just one petition. It could decide to consider only a single petition, if it opted to rule quite narrowly. But no one of the pending cases embraces all of the issues, so a more extended review appears to be in store.
