Update: Another Federal Trial Court Rules DOMA Unconstitutional

Following on the heels of Northern District of California Judge Jeffrey White's ruling in Golinski v. OPM in February and the First Circuit's decision in Gill last week, yesterday, a judge on the Southern District of New York ruled in Windsor v. OPM that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage for the purposes of federal law as between one man and one woman, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Like those other decisions (as well as Perry v. Brown in the Ninth Circuit, which considered California's state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage), the Windsor decision does not adopt heightened constitutional scrutiny, but nonetheless concludes that DOMA does not satisfy the more searching rationality review appropriate in cases that do not involve routine economic regulations. This is notable because Windsor is the first DOMA challenge in a jurisdiction where the governing circuit court had not previously decided whether or not heightened scrutiny applies to laws that discriminate against LGBT individuals (and indeed, Windsor is one of the cases whose filing prompted Attorney General Holder's February 2011 memo stating that the Department of Justice would no longer defend DOMA's constitutionality).

So what can we expect now? The members of the House of Representatives who defended DOMA's constitutionality in Golinski have already filed an appeal, the Gill decision is stayed pending certiorari being filed (fancy words for an appeal to the Supreme Court), and since the same group of members of Congress defended DOMA in Windsor, it is likely that this case will be appealed as well. We'll keep you posted.