How Does It Feel To Have One’s Work as a Historian Cited by the Supreme Court? Cool. Very Cool. Thank You Very Much.

How might “we”—historians of the present as well as future historians of the discipline—think about the part that the amicus “Brief of Historians of Marriage” [hereinafter, the “brief”] apparently played in Justice Kennedy’s opinion and in the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges?

Here are four suggestions about why the brief mattered and, more importantly, how it succeeded. They are directed both to us in the present as well as to future historians. They move from organizational skill to substance to politics to pedagogy.

First, insofar as the amicus brief played a part in the decision in Obergefell, much of the credit rests with Nancy Cott’s strategic and tactical brilliance, as well as her rhetorical and analytic insights. Without her, we would not be where we are today. For the past five years and more, she has, with a changing cast of lawyers and a growing crew of other gender historians, shepherded and tested an evolving brief—state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction—through changing contexts and a shifting legal culture. The arguments in that evolving brief responded to local and particular contexts. Each state had its own doctrinal and jurisprudential history that a particular incarnation of the brief had to speak to, and much of the earlier federal jurisdictional history was shaped by the presence of DOMA, the happily forgotten Defense of Marriage Act. But there was also a recognizable continuity from litigation context to litigation context. After all, what Cott and all of us sought to offer was an articulation and a summation of the state of the art of gendered legal history. And that did not change significantly during the years that we worked under Nancy Cott’s organizational lead.

It should be added that behind the brief (as it evolved and developed) lay more than a quarter century of historical brief writing—amicus briefs by historians of gender—that began with the second generation of abortion decisions (particularly in Casey and in Webster). Future historians will no doubt find that there were important lines of connection—about historical contingency and the ultimate indeterminacy of apparently unchanging legal categories, about the significance of legal and political struggles over gender norms, about changing notions of rights and criminality—between the controversial arguments made in amicus briefs in the abortion cases and the historical arguments made about same sex marriage in Obergefell.

Second, the underlying arguments made in the brief—that marriage was a changing institution, shaped by politics and by evolving constitutional norms, that marriage has only lately become an institution defined by egalitarian conceptions but that the politics of marriage have been wracked for two centuries by struggles over the demand for equality, that there has been an ongoing struggle to undo discriminations in marriage (defined by race and status and gender as well as sexual orientation), that there has been a three century movement to claim marriage as an expression of the desire for individual human happiness and dignity—those arguments “won” because they are right, or certainly more right than the historical understandings that were regnant only a few years ago. Remember, Justice White’s opinion for the Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1982) asserted unproblematically that western civilization was marked by a single unchanging understanding of the criminality of homosexual conduct. ...