Baker v. Nelson
Richard John Baker v. Gerald R. Nelson, 291 Minn. 310, 191 N.W.2d 185, is a case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court decided that construing a marriage statute to limit licenses to persons of the opposite sex "does not offend" the U.S. Constitution. Baker appealed the decision, and on October 10, 1972, the United States Supreme Court dismissed the appeal "for want of a substantial federal question". Because the case came to the U.S. Supreme Court through mandatory appellate review, the dismissal constituted a decision on the merits and established Baker v. Nelson as precedent, though 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. Subsequently, on June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly overruled Baker in Obergefell v. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
Facts and trial
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. 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 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.Hennepin County had argued that the marriage license issued previously suggested that the "Questions Raised by This Appeal Are Moot." The "moot" question was persuasive and, in retrospect, correct. 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 prevented lower courts from coming to a contrary conclusion when presented with the precise issue the Court adjudicated in dismissing the case.
The "moot" question suggested that the "precise issue" may not have been 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.
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 Jack Baker and Michael McConnell obtained a license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota and were married in Minneapolis by a United Methodist minister on 3 September 1971. In 2018, Assistant Chief Judge Gregory Anderson ruled that “The marriage is declared to be in all respects valid.”, both were retired and living as a couple in Minneapolis. In a 2016 interview, Baker revealed that some legal battles were still on-going.