On Monday, December 6, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to California's controversial Proposition 8. Passed by the state's voters in 2008, Proposition 8 amended the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is "valid or recognized." In August of this year the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the amendment violated the 14th Amendment's guarantees of due process and equal protection, and enjoined its enforcement.
Given the high level of interest in the case, the panel judges (Stephen Reinhardt of Los Angeles, Michael Daly Hawkins of Phoenix, and N. Randy Smith of Pocatello, Idaho) have given consent for live broadcast of the arguments. C-SPAN will air the proceedings beginning at 10 a.m. on Monday. (The Ninth Circuit's Public Information Office also reports that some law schools have elected to receive the live audio/video feed directly from the courtroom - among them NYU, Yale, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Arizona, Stanford, UC Hastings, and UCLA.)
You can link to selected documents filed in the appeal here. Some interesting dispatches about the legal battle can also be found at Prop 8 on Trial, a blog authored by two Berkeley law school students who have been monitoring the federal proceedings since their inception.
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