Last month, Mitchell Katine spent hours waiting in the cold and the rain so he could get inside the U.S. Supreme Court to watch two historic arguments in cases that could determine how the federal government treats the unions of same-sex couples.
Katine, a partner in Houston’s Katine & Nechman, had made a similar trip 10 years earlier, as part of a team of lawyers who successfully argued Lawrence v. Texas. The high court’s 6-3 decision in Lawrence on June 26, 2003, overturned Texas’ sodomy statute and was the last watershed legal moment for gay rights in the United States.
