Writ columnists Vik Amar and Alan Brownstein recently wrote an interesting article on the latest ruling in the litigation regarding Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay-marriage initiative. Using the process known as certification, the Ninth Circuit, in trying to figure out if the the proponents of Prop. 8 had standing to defend the case in federal court, asked the California Supreme Court for their input on “whether, at least as a matter of California law, initiative proponents enjoy some special capacity to represent the state’s electorate when public officials decline to defend a law adopted through direct democracy.”
This wasn’t the only case where the Ninth Circuit requested certification from the California Supreme Court. In fact, the Stanford Law School SCOCAL site has a whole chart about certification issues. This chart was created by attorneys at Hughes Hubbard and Reed (the family firm) and it tracks the questions of certification from the 9th Circuit to the California Supreme Court, with coverage from 1998 to the present, providing the text of the actual question or questions along with the associated 9th Circuit and California Supreme Court decisions. (Links to the full text of the decisions are also provided.) To learn more about the resource, check out Erika Wayne’s post from Legal Research Plus and also check out the chart, here.
