March 4: Legal Studies lecture
UD's Pollack to discuss legal status of same-sex marriage
2:30 p.m., Feb. 27, 2015--The University of Delaware Legal Studies program will present a talk, on the legal status of same-sex marriage, at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 4, in Room 228 Purnell Hall.
Sheldon D. Pollack, professor of business law, legal studies and political science at UD, will discuss “Same-Sex Marriage and Conflict of Law: The ‘Other’ Constitutional Issue.”
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The “other” issue referred to in the title of the lecture is the question of whether states that prohibit same-sex marriage are legally required to recognize such marriages when they are performed in states that permit them.
Most discussions about the legal issues involved in same-sex marriage focus on federal court rulings to decide whether same-sex couples have a basic constitutional right to marry, Pollack writes in a forthcoming article in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy.
But, he says, “A related and equally challenging constitutional question has received much less attention” whether all states must recognize same-sex marriages that have occurred in states where those unions are allowed. The Constitution requires states to give “full faith and credit” to the acts of another state, but Pollack says that provision has had a variety of conflicting legal interpretations.
The talk is free and open to the public.