On August 8, 2015, same-sex couples seeking to adopt in Mississippi and civil rights organizations filed this lawsuit in the U.S District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The plaintiffs sued, at various times, the Mississippi Department of Human Services, the Governor of Mississippi, the Mississippi DOJ, and the Mississippi judiciary under 42 U.S § 1983. Represented by private counsel, the plaintiffs asked for injunctive and declaratory relief, claiming that enforcement of the Mississippi statuary ban on same-sex adoptions violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The case was assigned to Judge Daniel P. Jordan. In his words, the state presented a tepid defense of the ban's constitutionality, focusing on procedural rather than substantive questions. Judge Jordan ultimately dismissed the lawsuits against all defendants but the Mississippi Department of Human Services on procedural grounds, but granted full preliminary injunctive relief to plaintiffs against the Mississippi Department of Human Services on May 13, 2016, 2016 WL 1306202, and converted the preliminary injunction into a permanent injunction two months later. (The state apparently agreed to the permanent injunction--submitting it for the court's approval. We don't know whether that was because the state had conceded, or whether it was facilitating entry of a final order to allow immediate appeal.)

Ryan Berry - 05/18/2016
Kelly Ehrenreich - 10/27/2016


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