Baker v. Nelson

Facts and trial

On May 18, 1970, two University of Minnesota gay student activists, Richard Baker and James Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license in Minneapolis. The clerk of the Hennepin County District Court, Gerald Nelson, 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 Minnesota's marriage statutes contained no explicit requirement that applicants be of different sexes. 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:

The trial court dismissed the couple's claims and ordered the clerk 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 decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, they claimed the Minnesota marriage statutes implicated three rights: they 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. On October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order stating "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 summary dismissal is a decision on the merits of the case. As binding precedent, Baker has prevented lower courts from coming to a contrary conclusion when presented with the precise issue the Court adjudicated in dismissing the case.

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:

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:

It matters not whether we think the decision [in Baker] was right in its time, remains right today, or will be followed by the Court in the future. Only the Supreme Court may overrule its own precedents, and we remain bound even by its summary decisions.... The Court has yet to inform us that we are not, and we have no license to engage in a guessing game about whether the Court will change its mind or, more aggressively, to assume authority to overrule Baker ourselves.

Conversely, Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey in dissent from Judge Sutton's decision that he believed Baker was binding precedent. She wrote:

And although the argument [Baker precedent] was vigorously pressed by the DOMA proponents in their Supreme Court brief in Windsor neither Justice Kennedy in his opinion for the court nor any of the four dissenting judges in their three separate opinions mentioned Baker.

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:

The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them. Baker v. Nelson must be and now is overruled, and the State laws challenged by Petitioners in these cases are now held invalid to the extent they exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.

Plaintiffs

During the pendency of the case, the plaintiffs Jack Baker and Michael McConnell obtained a license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota and were married by a Methodist pastor on 3 September 1971. They have maintained ever since that that marriage was and remains valid.

As of May 2015, both are retired and living as a couple in Minneapolis.