I’m sort of stealing this concept from KipEsquire (as I do many links lately).  He calls the feature “comment left elsewhere.  I thought it would be nice to have my own archive here if the comment is one relating to something I usually blog about, this time made on Trust, But Verify which is almost everything I remember about Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a child.  The full text of my comment below the jump.

The reason why the states are not uniform is because they all have their own constitutions.

The recent Connecticut decision looked at similar state constitutional questions, and reviewed all of the sister state precedents.

The CT court decided that the NY dissenting opinion on their marriage equality case was logical and used the correct application of scrutiny, etc. and that California also followed the correct procedure.

So they considered both CT and US federal case law that had guidelines for determining, and most states failed to use the correct criteria correctly.

Also, the CA Supreme Court only recognizes rational basis review and strict scrutiny; the US Supreme Court has been criticized for its case law on intermediate scrutiny.  There’s no equivalent in CA.

CT, meanwhile, does, and they made their decision on that basis.

I’m not sure if the current petitions for a writ are a first impression case.

The Official Proponents of Proposition 8 (as they are identified in court proceedings) are arguing so far that the Proposition 8 opponents are relying on “novel” interpretations and arguments.

Lambda Legal, on the other hand, mentioned in their recent conference call that there are 9 examples in case law to strike down an amendment as a revision.  6 failed, and 3 won.  They will argue that the cases with similarity to theirs should prevail, which would make 4/10 or almost half of such cases favorable for petitioners.

[Image from the catalog for a cool gift item for lawyers.]