Redeeming the Dream

Starred review from May 5, 2014
The lawyers who overturned California’s Proposition 8 offer a carefully crafted, highly accessible play-by-play of the complex four-and-a-half-year legal battle over the gay and lesbian right to marry. In 2008, Rob and Michelle Reiner, Kristina Schake, Chad Griffin, and their new organization, the American Foundation for Equal Rights, solicited Olson as the lawyer most likely to take a challenge of the popularly enacted referendum all the way to the Supreme Court, despite his conservative reputation. Olson had already turned down the opposition and believed strongly that “marriage equality was a truly conservative ideal, based on bedrock values such as liberty, freedom, and equality.” He reached out to Boies, his opponent in Bush v. Gore in 2000, who became a respected friend, to join him—both for his consummate skill as a trial lawyer and as evidence of credible bipartisan support for marriage equality. Together they built a case with well-chosen plaintiffs. Here, they walk a fine line, showing themselves as incontrovertibly in the right, while not devolving into self-aggrandizement. Their clear explanations about the landmark case and the judicial process in general will leave readers well-prepared to follow the subtleties of the discussion as individual states take on the gay marriage issue. Agent: Stanley Pottinger, Velocity Press.