Noah Feldman, Columnist

Legal Lions Boies and Olson Set Back Gay Marriage

In the effort to legalize gay marriage, there's no room for Ted Olson and David Boies, two accomplished, intelligent and charming people who have lumbered into a sensitive and complex area of legal activism in which they are, frankly, newcomers.

February 7, 2014 at 9:45 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Eons ago -- OK, 1996 -- I was a fresh-faced summer associate at the venerable white shoe law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York. As part of their civilizing mission for law students, the firm not only taught us how to drink dry martinis but urged us to adopt a pro bono cause. The most dynamic associate I met happened to be out of the closet, and by his good offices I ended up doing some work that summer for the Marriage Project of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, run by the pioneering gay-marriage activist Evan Wolfson. At the time, the Hawaii Supreme Court had just become the first court to find that equality required same-sex marriage, and the predecessor to the Defense of Marriage Act was being bandied about in Congress: For an aspiring constitutional lawyer, it was game on.

I thought of Wolfson this week when hearing that Ted Olson and David Boies, lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore respectively in the great 2000 recount, were once again trying toattach themselves to gay marriage cases with a good chance of reaching the Supreme Court.