Iowa Supremes Draw a Crowd

In my second year of law school, I attended the training course for prosecuting interns required by Iowa law. We got two perks: 1) Tour the Department of Criminal Investigattions laboratory (very cool); and 2) Watch an Iowa Supreme Court argument (cool for us but about as interesting as you'd expect). We entered an echoing, formal courtroom to find the two attorneys and a couple of extraneous court personnel. That was it, until the justices arrived.



Apparently, it was quite different on Friday, when six Iowa legislators got their PR suit heard. They were suing based on an allegation that Judge Neary's ruling last year granting the dissolution of a Vermont Civil Union caused them enough personal harm to allow them to intervene in a motion to set aside the ruling. According to the Des Moines Register:

"Iowa's chief justice on Friday questioned whether six Republican lawmakers have the legal standing to challenge a judge's controversial ruling that granted a divorce to a lesbian couple.



"What injuries have you suffered?" Chief Justice Louis Lavorato asked the lawyer for the legislators, who have argued that the 2003 divorce ruling by Judge Jeffrey Neary of Merrill legitimized the couple's Vermont civil union, which is not recognized in Iowa.



The Iowa Supreme Court took up the issue Friday. The oral arguments drew a crowd that filled the spacious fourth-floor courtroom at the new judiciary building.



. . .



Neary signed the divorce papers during a brief daily period when judges meet with attorneys and approve routine orders. He said he didn't realize the two people in the divorce were women until after he signed the papers.



But when he discovered the facts, he declined to withdraw the order, and a few weeks later amended it to say that he ended only the civil union in Vermont, not a marriage.



His critics say that he should have sent the two women back to Vermont if they wanted a divorce, and that he encroached on the Legislature's authority to make law.



Six Republican lawmakers, joined by U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Ia., and a Le Mars minister, took the issue to court. Their attorney, Kevin Theriot of the Alliance Defense Fund in Kansas City, told Lavorato that the lawmakers, as "the public," have a stake in Neary's ruling, even if they weren't involved in the case."