The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently announced that it will move to “in-house publishing” of its opinions. According to the press release, “Court staff now manage the process of converting opinions from the original word processing documents into Adobe PDF files, which are then uploaded onto the website, where they can be viewed and/or downloaded by the public.” This…
Writ columnists Vik Amar and Alan Brownstein recently wrote an interesting article on the latest ruling in the litigation regarding Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay-marriage initiative. Using the process known as certification, the Ninth Circuit, in trying to figure out if the the proponents of Prop. 8 had standing to defend the case in federal court, asked the California Supreme Court…
On Monday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit extended its decision to keep sealed the videos from Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the federal trial on California’s same-sex marriage initiative, Proposition 8).
Earlier this week, a panel of Ninth Circuit judges held in Diaz v. Brewer that an Arizona bill withdrawing health benefits for domestic partners of state employees violated the federal Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. The state originally offered these benefits to spouses of state employees, but in April 2008 expanded coverage to include both same-sex and different-sex domestic partners. In…