Baker v. Nelson

''Richard John Baker v. Gerald R. Nelson'', 291 Minn. 310, 191 N.W.2d 185 (1971), was a case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court decided that construing a marriage statute to restrict marriage licenses to persons of the opposite sex "does not offend" the U.S. Constitution. Baker appealed the decision, and on October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the appeal "for want of a substantial federal question".

Because the case came to the Supreme Court through mandatory appellate review (not ''certiorari''), the dismissal constituted a decision on the merits and established ''Baker v. Nelson'' as precedent, although the extent of its precedential effect had been subject to debate. In May 2013, Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage and it took effect on August 1, 2013. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court explicitly overruled ''Baker'' in '' Obergefell v. Hodges'', making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
Obergefell v. Hodges
', No. 14-556, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

Facts and trial

On 18 May 1970, activists James Michael McConnell, librarian, and Richard John Baker, law student on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota, applied for a marriage license in Minneapolis. Gerald Nelson, Clerk of District Court in Hennepin County, denied the request on the sole ground that the two were of the same sex. The couple filed suit in district court to force Nelson to issue the license.

The couple first contended that their request for a marriage license was not forbidden.1970: "Minnesota Statutes Annotated", ''West Publishing Co.''
* Chapter 517.01: Marriage a civil contract. "Marriage, so far as its validity in law is concerned, is a civil contract, to which the consent of the parties, capable in law of contracting, is essential."
* Chapter 517.03: Marriages prohibited. he list does not include parties of the same gender./ref> If the court were to construe the statutes to require different-sex couples, however, Baker claimed such a reading would violate several provisions of the U.S. Constitution:
* First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association),
* Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment),
* Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and
* Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause).

The trial court dismissed the couple's claims and ordered Nelson not to issue the license.

Appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court

The couple appealed the district court's decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Court heard oral argument in the case on September 21, 1971. During the oral argument, while Baker and McConnell's lawyer was presenting his case, Justice Fallon Kelly turned his chair around, thus literally turning his back on the attorney. The justices did not ask a single question during the oral argument to Baker and McConnell's lawyer or to the assistant county attorney who represented the clerk.

In a brief opinion issued on October 15, 1971, authored by Justice C. Donald Peterson, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the trial court's dismissal. Based on the common usage of the term "marriage" and gender-specific references elsewhere in the same chapter, the Court held that the statutes prohibited marriage between persons of the same sex. This restriction, the Court reasoned, did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage.

With respect to the claim of an equal-protection violation, the Court found that childless marriages presented no more than a theoretical imperfection in the state's rationale for limiting marriage to different-sex couples. It found the plaintiffs' reliance on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in '' Loving v. Virginia'', finding an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, failed to provide a parallel: "in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex."

The Court acknowledged that Justice Goldberg's concurrence in '' Griswold v. Connecticut'', which argued that criminalizing the possession of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy, found support for marital privacy partly in the Ninth Amendment, but the Court distinguished ''Griswold'' and found no authority for the Ninth Amendment being binding on the states. The Court dismissed the plaintiffs' claims under the First and Eighth Amendments without discussion.

Appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court

Baker and McConnell appealed the Minnesota court's opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, they claimed that the marriage statute, as construed, implicated three rights: it abridged their fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; discriminated based on gender, contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and deprived them of privacy rights flowing from the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution.Appellant's Jurisdictional Statement, ''Baker v. Nelson,'' Supreme Court docket no. 71-1027, at 3, ''available at'
DOMAwatch.org
(accessed Oct. 28, 2009) (questions presented).

In his "Motion to Dismiss Appeal and Brief", the Hennepin County Attorney argued, correctly, that the marriage license issued previously made this case moot. On October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court responded with a one-sentence order: "The appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question."

In most cases presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court's refusal to hear the case is not an endorsement of the decision below. However, since this case came to the Court through mandatory appellate review,The U.S. Supreme Court was required to accept the appeal as a matter of right, a practice that the Supreme Court Case Selections Act ended in 1988. the summary dismissal is a decision on the merits of the case.Project, (discussing ''Baker''s posture as precedent); ''see, e.g.'' As binding precedent, ''Baker'' prevented lower courts from coming to a contrary conclusion when presented with the precise issue the Court adjudicated in dismissing the case.''See, e.g
Mandel v. Bradley
', 432 U.S. 173, 176 (1977) (" smissals for want of a substantial federal question without doubt reject the specific challenges presented in the statement of jurisdiction.... They do prevent lower courts from coming to opposite conclusions on the precise issues presented and necessarily decided by those actions."); ''see generally'' Note,

The "moot" question suggested that perhaps the "precise issue" was not the right of citizens to marry the adult of one's choice.

Application of the ''Baker'' precedent

When dealing with precedents like ''Baker,'' lower courts may have to guess at the meaning of these unexplained decisions. The Supreme Court has laid out rules, however, to guide lower courts in narrowly applying these summary dispositions:
* The facts in the potentially binding case must not bear any legally significant differences to the case under consideration.
* The binding precedent encompasses only the issues presented to the Court, not the reasoning found in the lower court's decision.
* Of the issues presented, only those necessarily decided by the Court in dismissing the case control.
* Subsequent developments by the Court on the relevant doctrines may cast doubt on the continuing validity of a summary judgment.

In recent years, most judges faced with claims like those in ''Baker'' have concluded that subsequent developments render ''Baker'' no longer authoritative. During the 2013 oral argument in ''Hollingsworth v. Perry'', U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized her view of ''Baker'': "The Supreme Court hadn't even decided that gender-based classifications get any kind of heightened scrutiny. And the same-sex intimate conduct was considered criminal in many states in 1971, so I don't think we can extract much in ''Baker v. Nelson''."

Following the Supreme Court's ruling in June 2013 in ''United States v. Windsor'' that found unconstitutional the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that forbade federal government recognition of same-sex marriages, no U.S. Court of Appeals held that ''Baker'' controlled in a case challenging a state ban on same-sex marriage, until November 6, 2014, when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ''Baker'' precluded it from considering several such cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The author of the opinion, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, argued that ''Windsor'' in no way contradicted ''Baker'': "''Windsor'' invalidated a federal law that refused to respect state laws permitting gay marriage, while ''Baker'' upheld the right of the people of a State to define marriage as they see it." He wrote in '' DeBoer v. Snyder'' that:

Conversely, Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey dissented from the court's decision that ''Baker'' was binding precedent. She wrote:

The precedential value of ''Baker'' was the subject of ongoing disputes in some other circuits. In the First Circuit, an October 2014 district court decision rejected a similar challenge to Puerto Rico's ban on same-sex marriage and said the First Circuit had "expressly acknowledged–a mere two years ago–that ''Baker'' remains binding precedent" in '' Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services''. There were also dissenting opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Tenth Circuits in 2014 that found ''Baker'' controlling.

''Obergefell v. Hodges''

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled ''Baker'' in '' Obergefell v. Hodges''. In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

Plaintiffs

During the pendency of the case, the plaintiffs Michael McConnell and Jack Baker obtained a license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, and returned to Minneapolis to be married on 3 September 1971 by a minister from the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.

, both were retired and living as a couple in Minneapolis. In a 2016 interview, Baker revealed that some legal battles were still on-going. In 2018, Assistant Chief Judge Gregory Anderson ruled that "The marriage is declared to be in all respects valid."Sources: Michael McConnell Files, "America's First Gay Marriage" (binder #4), Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, ''U of M Libraries''.
* Fifth Judicial District, File #07-CV-16-4559;
** 18 September 2018: CONCLUSIONS OF LAW by Assistant Chief Judge Gregory Anderson, at 4
available online
from ''U of M Libraries''.
** . . . "The September 3, 1971 marriage of James Michael McConnell and Pat Lyn McConnell, a/k/a Richard John Baker, has never been dissolved or annulled by judicial decree and no grounds currently exist on which to invalidate the marriage."
** "The marriage is declared to be in all respects valid".The marriage certificate i
available online
in Minnesota Official Marriage System (MOMS). Search for Blue Earth, oth Applicants Pat Lyn McConnell, 9/3/1971.

See also

* List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 409
* List of LGBT-related cases in the United States Supreme Court

Notes

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

Text of Baker v. Nelson from Minnesota Supreme Court (1971)

Text of Baker v. Nelson from U.S. Supreme Court (1972)

Baker and McConnell's jurisdictional statement filing with the U.S. Supreme Court

Minnesota state case law
1972 in United States case law
LGBTQ rights in Minnesota
1971 in Minnesota
1972 in LGBTQ history
Overruled United States Supreme Court decisions
United States same-sex union case law
1971 in LGBTQ history
LGBTQ history in Minnesota