Amy K. Matsui, Senior Counsel and Director of Women and the Courts

Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage for all purposes under federal law as between one man and one woman, violates the U.S. Constitution. And yesterday, the Ninth Circuit announced that it would not review en banc the panel decision in Perry v. Brown, which held that California's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage violates the federal Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The First Circuit's decision last week paired with the Ninth Circuit's decision not to further review Perry raises the possibility that the Supreme Court may weigh in on questions of marriage equality under the Constitution sooner rather than later.

The First Circuit's decision is the first time a federal court of appeals has held that DOMA is unconstitutional. (The National Women's Law Center joined a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause.) The First Circuit's ruling was issued in two consolidated cases. In Gill v. Massachusetts, same-sex couples married under state law argued that Section 3 of DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause by preventing same-sex spouses of federal employees from receiving the same spousal benefits as opposite-sex spouses; and in Massachusetts v. Department of Health and Human Services, the commonwealth of Massachusetts argued that this section of DOMA was invalid under the Tenth Amendment and the Spending Clause because federal funding for specific programs was premised on denying benefits to same-sex married couples. In 2010, a Massachusetts district court had ruled that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional in both cases.