Yesterday the Supreme Court took action in two different cases about same-sex marriage. In one, Pavan v. Smith, the court summarily reversed an Arkansas Supreme Court decision about Arkansas’s birth-certificate regime, concluding that because “Arkansas law makes birth certificates about more than just genetics” and sometimes allows spouses who are not biological parents to be listed on the birth certificate, it must extend the same recognition to same-sex couples.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch dissented (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.). Interestingly, Gorsuch did not quarrel with the correctness of Obergefell, but rather suggested that the case did not meet the standards for summary reversal, which he said is “usually reserved for cases ‘where the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error.'” (As an aside, I take it that these criteria are supposed to be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for summary reversal — the court certainly does not summarily reverse every case that is a clear error in the application of settled law. And as I’ve written extensively in “The Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket,” it is actually quite a parlor game to figure out what, in practice, the criteria for summary reversal really are.)

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