What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said

What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Same-Sex Marriage Decision (Yale University Press, 2020) features an all-star cast of legal scholars who rewrite the famous 2015 opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry.  In eleven incisive opinions, the authors offer the best constitutional arguments for and against the right to same-sex marriage, and debate what Obergefell should mean for the future. The book also provides a critical introduction to the case, recounting the story of the gay rights litigation that led to Obergefell, and explaining how courts respond to political mobilizations for new rights claims. The social movement for gay rights and marriage equality is a powerful example of how—through legal imagination and political struggle—arguments once dismissed as “off-the-wall” can later become established in American constitutional law.