The U.S. Supreme Court established landmark constitutional law on June 26 with its marriage-equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, but Professor Daniel Pinello of John Jay College’s Department of Political Science has long been ahead of the curve in studying judicial and legislative battlegrounds in the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights.

Pinello’s groundbreaking book Gay Rights and American Law, published in 2003 by Cambridge University Press, analyzed 398 state and federal appellate-court decisions between 1981 and 2000, and concluded, among other things, that presidential party predicted case outcome far better than any other personal attribute of federal judges in his inquiry.

Pinello followed up that book three years later with another volume published by Cambridge, America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage; a third, America’s War on Same-Sex Couples and Their Families, is forthcoming. For those books, Pinello conducted nearly 300 in-depth interviews with gay and lesbian couples in 10 states, as well as with interest-group leaders and other relevant parties on both sides of the marriage-equality debate.

“All of the interviews occurred prior to any significant federal court intervention in the same-sex marriage policy arena,” Pinello pointed out. “That is, I spoke with people before there was good reason to believe that statewide marriage bans would go away any time soon.”

Earlier this year, Pinello reached an agreement with Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library to preserve and house his interviews as part of what he described as the library’s “impressive LGBT archive.”

In the immediate aftermath of the June 26 Obergefell decision, Pinello said he “had every reason to predict [the outcome],” citing Justice Anthony Kennedy’s voting history on LGBT rights — despite the Justice having been appointed by a Republican President — and the Supreme Court’s “recent inclination not to intervene when lower courts permitted same-sex marriages to proceed.”

And with that ruling, Pinello opined, the significant battle around marriage equality is now over. “There may be temporary insults or fleeting setbacks,” he said, “but the fundamental right of lesbian and gay pairs to marry is now unalterably fixed nationwide.”

For more on Pinello’s LGBTQ rights research, see the recently published John Jay journal “Fifty Years of Research.”

Pinello also commented on the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in the following Washington Post articles.

“Can a Texas county clerk refuse to issue a gay marriage license? It’s complicated.”
June 29, 2015
The Washington Post

“Same-sex marriages go forward in south despite leaders’ reluctance”
June 29, 2015 
The Washington Post