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California Civil Procedure, Keyed to Levine, 6th Ed.
City and County of San Francisco v. State
Citation:
128 Cal. App. 4th 1030, 27 Cal. Rptr. 3d 722 (2005)Facts
In February 2004, San Francisco, at the direction of its mayor and county clerk, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Two lawsuits were immediately filed seeking to halt this practice. The California Supreme Court stayed those proceedings but permitted constitutional challenges to California’s marriage statutes. The City filed a complaint on March 11, 2004, challenging Family Code sections 300, 301, and 308.5 as unconstitutional insofar as they prohibited same-sex marriage. The next day, individual same-sex couples and advocacy groups filed a similar action (Woo v. Lockyer). The Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund, representing over 15,000 California residents who supported Proposition 22, promptly sought to intervene in both cases. The Fund’s board included Senator William J. (Pete) Knight, the official proponent of Proposition 22, and other members who had actively campaigned for the initiative’s passage. The trial court consolidated the cases and denied the Fund’s intervention motions.
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