Six friend of the court briefs were filed this week asking the US Supreme Court to hear Adar v. Smith, the case of the gay male couple denied an accurate revised birth certificate for the Louisiana-born child they adopted in New York. Lambda Legal represents the couple and filed a cert petition on their behalf last month.
Lambda's press release Thursday summarizes and links to the six briefs.
It is never an easy decision to ask the Supreme Court to hear a gay rights case. There is always the possibility of losing, thereby making bad law for the entire country. But the Fifth Circuit en banc ruling in Adar, which I wrote about here, has the potential to make mischief beyond the states that are bound by it (Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi).
Lambda deserves huge credit for their representation of this couple and their coordination of the friend of the court briefs filed in support of the cert petition. I am one of the more than two dozen family law professors named as amici in one of the briefs, and I want to give a special shout out to Joan Hollinger at UC Berkeley and Courtney Joslin at UC Davis, as well as the National Center for Lesbian Rights, for their work on this brief. As I reviewed the list of fellow family law profs on this brief -- most heterosexual and without a primary focus in their work on LGBT families -- I am also grateful that so many highly respected scholars care enough about our families and the children we raise to lend their considerable prestige to this case.
We won't hear back from the Supreme Court until October.
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