New and events of the Philadelphia Bar Asso.
Issue link: https://thephiladelphialawyer.epubxp.com/i/434516
the philadelphia lawyer Winter 2015 47 appellate lawyer," but Cooper, at oral argument on his motion for summary judgment (Boies and Olsen filed none), in what they call, and rightly so, "one of the most memorable and decisive moments in the case," when asked what harm would be caused, said, "I don't know. I don't know." (p. 85-86) Wow! If plaintiffs had not filed a motion for summary judgment yet, then would have been the time to do so. The balance of the book (212 pages) is anticlimactic as the authors foreshadow, "In the end, neither he nor his trial witnesses nor his colleagues knew of any harm that would result from allowing same-sex couples to have the same right to marry that opposite-sex couples enjoyed." The opponents were not exactly Paper Tigers and the result was not preordained, but these straw men eventually fell at every level, including the U.S. Supreme Court. The ultimate irony was that the court let stand the lower court's ruling that the Proposition 8 Amendment was unconstitutional because the intervenors did not have standing. Proof positive that a procedural ruling on standing can be used to do the right thing, 157 years after the court used the same device to do an awful thing in Dred Scott. Lastly, the touching stories of the carefully selected same-sex couple plaintiffs and their desire to marry will bring a tear to the eye of all but the most hardhearted. Though they represented the interests of some 18,000 California same-sex couples who had married before Proposition 8 passed, and thousands of others who wished to do so, their individual, personal love stories speak so much more than the thousands of pages of legal briefs and transcripts. No one, however, seems to have made the comedian's point that since opponents of gay marriage are really against gay sex, they would more likely get the results they wanted by letting gay couples get married. M. Kelly Tillery (tilleryk@pepperlaw.com), a partner with Pepper Hamilton LLP, is Editor-in-Chief of The Philadelphia Lawyer. "In the end, neither he nor his trial witnesses nor his colleagues knew of any harm that would result from allowing same-sex couples to have the same right to marry that opposite-sex couples enjoyed."