On February 1, 2012, a military veteran with multiple sclerosis who married her wife in California in 2008 filed suit challenging DOMA and other laws governing the Department of Veterans Affairs. The plaintiff, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU of Southern California, and private counsel, alleged that the laws violated her equal protection rights, because she would be entitled to larger monthly disability payments if she were recognized as a legally married person. She sought declaratory relief under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2001-2202.

The House Republican-appointed "Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group" (BLAG) appeared to defend the constitutionality of the challenged statutes. BLAG sought a stay of proceedings while similar issues were resolved in Golinski v. OPM, a DOMA case in the 9th Circuit. On August 3, 2012, Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, the district court judge in this case, denied the stay.

In December, after the Supreme Court granted review on the issue in United States v. Windsor, BLAG renewed its motion for a stay, pending the outcome in the Supreme Court. The U.S. has declined to defend the constitutionality of the statutes in question, but it filed a motion to dismiss, on the grounds that the Veterans' Judicial Review Act confers exclusive jurisdiction on the VA Secretary over benefits claims, depriving the district court here of jurisdiction to order an award of benefits. The U.S. noted that this plaintiff had already initiated proceedings before the VA (though those proceedings were stalled). On August 29, the court denied the defendant's motion to dismiss.

On March 12, 2014, Judge Marshall declared that DOMA was unconstitutional under the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The court ruled against sections within DOMA that required a "spouse" or "surviving spouse" to be a member of the opposite sex. The defendants were enjoined from using DOMA to deny recognition of the plaintiff's same-sex marriage, which had been recognized by the State of California.

The case is now closed.

- 11/27/2012
Alex Colbert-Taylor - 06/25/2013
Megan Dolan - 10/25/2015


compress summary