How One Woman And Her Lawyer Changed U.S. History

Where would the marriage equality movement be without Edie Windsor?

When we filed Edie’s case in 2009, only five states permitted gay couples to marry, and that did not include our home state of New York, which did not enact marriage equality until 2011. In 2013, when I argued the case at the Supreme Court, only nine states allowed gay couples to marry. When the Windsor decision came down three months later, 12 states did. And when Obergefell was decided this past year, 37 states already recognized the equality of gay people in marriage.

I like to think that my client and friend Edie Windsor had something to do with that.

Roberta Kaplan, the Paul Weiss litigation partner who represented Edie Windsor before the Supreme Court in the landmark case of U.S. v. Windsor, speaking to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick about how bringing down the Defense of Marriage Act affected the marriage equality movement nationwide.

(Robbie Kaplan, ATL’s 2013 Lawyer of the Year, is the author of Then Comes Marriage (affiliate link), which just hit bookstores.)

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