# United States v. Windsor (2013) Decided **June 26, 2013**, 5–4 (Kennedy joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan). The Supreme Court struck down **Section 3 of the [[Defense of Marriage Act]]** — the provision defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman for all federal purposes — on equal-protection and due-process grounds. *Windsor* was the direct doctrinal predecessor of [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] two years later, and one of the most-cited cases in the modern American LGBTQ rights canon. ## The Named Plaintiff **Edith "Edie" Windsor** (1929–2017) was an 83-year-old retired IBM systems engineer when she became the named plaintiff. She and her partner Thea Spyer had been together since 1965; they were married in Toronto in 2007. When Spyer died in 2009, the IRS — applying DOMA Section 3 — refused to recognize Windsor as Spyer's spouse for federal estate-tax purposes, leaving Windsor with a **$363,053 federal estate tax bill** that an opposite-sex spouse would not have owed. Windsor sued for a refund, won at the district and circuit court levels, and the Justice Department — having concluded DOMA Section 3 was unconstitutional in 2011 — declined to defend it. House Republicans intervened to defend the statute through the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG). The Supreme Court took the case in part to resolve the unusual standing posture. ## The Holding Justice Kennedy's majority opinion held that Section 3 of DOMA violated the **[[Fifth Amendment]]'s Due Process Clause** (the federal-government equivalent of the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]'s Equal Protection Clause). The opinion's framework echoed *Romer* — locating DOMA Section 3's constitutional violation in the apparent **animus** behind the legislation: > The principal purpose [of DOMA] is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency. Responsibilities, as well as rights, enhance the dignity and integrity of the person. And DOMA contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not other couples, of both rights and responsibilities. ## Scalia's Dissent as Prophecy (Again) [[Justice Scalia]]'s dissent — like his *Lawrence v. Texas* dissent ten years earlier — predicted explicitly that the *Windsor* logic would compel a future ruling on state-level marriage bans. He was correct: every federal court except one that considered state same-sex marriage bans between *Windsor* and *Obergefell* (2015) cited *Windsor* in striking those bans down. ## Place in the Vault *Windsor* is the **second of the three Kennedy LGBTQ-rights opinions** that, together with *Romer* (1996) and *Obergefell* (2015), constitute the doctrinal core of the marriage-equality legal revolution. It is also the case that effectively neutered the [[Defense of Marriage Act]] before the [[Respect for Marriage Act]] (2022) formally repealed it. The decision came down on **June 26, 2013** — the same calendar date as both [[Lawrence v. Texas]] (June 26, 2003) and [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] (June 26, 2015). The Court's end-of-Term schedule made June 26 the operative anniversary for three of the four major modern American LGBTQ-rights decisions, which is now built into the queer-rights calendar. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Defense of Marriage Act]] - [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] - [[Lambda Legal]]