The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for a quick decision in its case against Wisconsin’s ban on gay marriage – and it might just get it.
Although some of the plaintiffs hail from Milwaukee, the organization filed the case in Wisconsin’s Western District in Madison, long known as a “rocket docket” that issues speedy decisions in complicated cases. According to a study by Stanford law professor Mark Lemley, the court tried patent cases (a good litmus for difficult litigation) in an average of about six months between 2000 and 2010, as compared to about 15 months in the Eastern District court in Milwaukee.
The judge handling the same-sex suit, Barbara Crabb, built the court’s rocket docket reputation alongside now-retired Judge John Shabaz. Nokia and other national companies have chosen the Madison court for disputes they’d like to settle quickly, and Crabb and Shabaz developed a reputation for setting strict deadlines with lawyers and bringing cases to trial at an above-average rate; juries tend to favor plaintiffs in patent cases.
About a third of states now recognize same-sex marriage, and the ACLU case pits the organization’s lawyers against Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and corporation counsels representing local officials named in the suit. Kentucky’s attorney general made headlines last week for a teary-eyed address in which he announced he wouldn’t defend that state’s ban, and much was made of a Gallup poll last summer that found that 52 percent of Americans favored legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states.
The ACLU announced on Tuesday that it wouldn’t be asking Crabb to issue a temporary injunction preventing district attorneys from prosecuting plaintiffs who married in states outside of Wisconsin. Prosecutors in Milwaukee and Eau Claire have said they won’t enforce Wisconsin’s “marriage evasion” statute outlawing such unions, another target of the ACLU case.
See our recent feature on gay marriage in Wisconsin, For Love & Money.
(image via Shutterstock)
