PEORIA -- A talk on legal issues relevant to California's ban on same-sex marriages takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 5 at Bradley Hall Room 250 on the Bradley University campus. The speaker, a distinguished legal scholar and author, says the case was "a strategic and tactical mistake."
From the news release:
The lawsuit filed in a California federal court by two of the country’s most prominent attorneys – one (David Boies) a titan of liberal causes, the other (Ted Olsen) a veteran of Republican administrations and a conservative stalwart – challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8 received much national attention.
It was a follow-up to the unsuccessful challenge launched in state court, which sought to block Prop 8 solely on state constitutional grounds. One of the most interesting dimensions of the reaction to the case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, was the reception it received among prominent scholars, leaders, and litigators in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement – and their response was far from uniformly supportive.
To the contrary, most argued that the suit was a strategic and tactical mistake, likely to result in an adverse decision, perhaps from the Supreme Court of the United States, and that such a decision would set back the cause of marital equality for same-sex couples for decades to come.
The speaker, Sam Marcossom, further states: I will argue in this talk that the Prop 8 challenge should not have been brought.
Despite its strength on the merits, and even despite the undoubted quality of the attorneys handling the case, the plaintiffs’ chances of success are exceedingly small. Indeed, the best that advocates for LGBT rights can realistically hope for is that the case never reaches the Supreme Court at all, or that if it does, the Court ends up not deciding the case on the merits.
This is a case study in the necessity of effectively and carefully judging the litigation landscape, and of learning the lesson that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund taught us more than half a century ago: few qualities are more important than patience in a legal struggle for civil rights and equality. In bringing the Perry case, Boies and Olsen forgot that lesson.
The news release states: Sam Marcosson is a Professor at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. He is a 1983 graduate of Bradley, with a B.S. in Political Science, and received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1986. In 2002 he was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Bradley University. Before joining the faculty at Louisville, he clerked for a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, and then spent eight years at the Office of General Counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. Since joining the Louisville faculty in 1996, he has taught courses in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Employment Discrimination, Sexual Orientation and the Law, and several others. He served as Associate Dean for Student Life from 2004-06. In 2009, he received the University’s Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching.
Since joining the faculty, Professor Marcosson’s research and writing has concentrated on constitutional law (especially the Fourteenth Amendment), and the civil rights issues facing lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. He has served on the Board of Directors of the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association, and was the programming coordinator for its annual conference in 1998. Most recently, he has since 2008 served on the Coordinating Committee of Louisville’s Fairness Campaign.
Professor Marcosson is the author of numerous articles and a book, Original Sin: Clarence Thomas and the Failure of the Constitutional Conservatives, published by the New York University Press in 2002.
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