Securities Law: Amgen a Victory for the Investing Public

In an important vindication of shareholder rights, the U.S. Supreme Court in February's Amgen v. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, on a 6-3 vote, held that securities fraud plaintiffs have no obligation to prove that defendant's misrepresentations and omissions were material at the class certification stage.

Your Money: A Supreme Court Victory Won’t Flatten Same-Sex Hurdles

But a victory for gay rights in either of the two monumental cases being presented to the justices next week will not necessarily resolve all the complicated financial and legal issues that now confront same-sex couples. Gay couples would probably still need to contend with a patchwork of state laws, many of which don’t recognize their unions and, perhaps even more important, their legal relationship to their children.

Much rides on how the opinions are ultimately written, something we probably won’t know until June (and that assumes the court decides to issue opinions on the merits in both cases). But even if the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that denies federal benefits to same-sex couples were overturned, many gay people would still need to travel to another state to get married, whereas opposite-sex couples can just run down to their local county clerk’s office.

And even then, some legal experts say, more work will most likely need to be done — either through the courts or Congress — to ensure that the marriages of people living in states hostile to gay marriage are recognized for federal purposes.

“There is this delusion that once DOMA is gone, all same-sex couples will have access to all of these federal rights and benefits, but that is just not true,” said Emily Hecht-McGowan, director of public policy at the Family Equality Council. “We only have a handful of states that allow for marriage equality. You would have to travel to one of those states to get married.”

The second issue being presented before the Supreme Court addresses a more expansive question, about who has the right to marry. It challenges Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. “The Prop 8 case is a broader case than the DOMA case because the remedy in the Prop 8 case would be, at a minimum, to allow same-sex couples in California to marry,” said James D. Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s project dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, “and it might also be that every state in the country has to allow same-sex couples to marry.”

The court, of course, could keep the laws as they are now, or go in any of several other directions. But let’s look at how life would change for same-sex couples if they woke up one June morning to learn that, at the very least, the Defense of Marriage Act had been dismantled.

I turned to a same-sex couple I interviewed more than four years ago, Jeff Friedman and Andrew Zwerin, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., to see how they would fare. Back then, they told me about a slightly torn manila folder stuffed with documents — their marriage license, their son’s adoption decree, among other things — that proved they were a family. They didn’t travel far without it.

The couple, both 44, still have the folder, which is now showing even more signs of wear. Mr. Friedman said they would continue to carry it around even if DOMA were overturned because they wanted to be sure their family was recognized wherever they may go. That’s especially important, they said, because they have had to prove their family status to hospital staff members on more than one occasion. And unfortunately, they’ve had to make more than a dozen trips to the emergency room because their 9-year-old son, Joshua, battles allergies and asthma. On one occasion, when Josh was barely breathing because of a severe asthma attack, a nurse wouldn’t admit the family to the pediatric unit even after the couple provided a birth certificate that named them as the parents. The nurse was waiting for a mother.

Then there was the time, about six years ago, when Mr. Friedman was hospitalized after a heart attack. A staff member told Mr. Zwerin, in front of their son, that he couldn’t sign his husband’s medical papers because they weren’t family. “Josh came to me each morning as I lay in cardiac intensive care asking if we are a family now,” Mr. Friedman said. Josh was 3 at the time.

“Unless they completely get rid of DOMA and mandate all states to treat people equally, I am going to have that issue again sometime, somewhere,” Mr. Friedman added. (In 2011, the Obama administration asked the Department of Health and Human Services to enforce rules that allow gay partners to visit and to be sure that medical decision-making rights were respected, too.)

The eradication of DOMA would, however, help the couple financially. If their union were recognized by the federal government — they’re one of the 18,000 or so couples who married in California before the state stopped issuing marriage licenses there — they would also save about $7,000 a year in federal income taxes. Couples with a stay-at-home parent like Mr. Friedman, or where one member earns significantly less, typically owe less in federal taxes when they can file jointly — though other couples, including those who earn about the same amount, would probably end up paying more.

Living in New York, where gay marriage is legal, further complicates their tax situation. They need to file multiple sets of returns — they are single filers for federal purposes, but joint filers for state purposes, which means they need to fill out a dummy federal form, as if they were filing a joint federal return, so they can properly fill out the state return.

Until recently, the couple also had to pay extra taxes on health insurance: gay employees who add their partners to their health benefits are often taxed on the value of that coverage (if they are lucky enough to be offered domestic partner insurance) because their unions are not federally recognized. Opposite-sex married couples are not subject to the tax, so some employers — including Time Warner, where Mr. Zwerin is manager of information technology at HBO — have tried to level the playing field by covering the extra costs for employees in same-sex relationships.

Federal recognition would allow Mr. Friedman, who used to practice law, to collect Social Security benefits on Mr. Zwerin’s record should Mr. Zwerin die first. He would also be entitled to collect a small death benefit, as well as spousal benefits while they were both alive.