By Mike Sacks, From The National Law Journal

Facing each other in two parallel lines along the U.S. Supreme Court’s sidewalk awaiting Tuesday’s same-sex marriage oral arguments were a woman and a man with paths that could only have met at One First Street.

Kyle Velte stood on the west side of the pavement, the 45th person in the line reserved for members of the Supreme Court bar. She is a lecturer at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she teaches a course called “Sexual Orientation and the Law.” She flew to Washington on Sunday night to come full circle.

“I was here for Romer v. Evans in 1995, and it’s because of Romer I went to law school,” said Velte, now 44, referring to the landmark gay rights case that started the court towards the same-sex marriage case 20 years later. She was working with the National Organization for Women at the time and had camped out overnight to see former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky argue—successfully, it turned out—against an amendment to the Colorado constitution stripping gays and lesbians of antidiscrimination protections.

“The night before people had been passing briefs around, and that was the first time I’d ever seen a legal brief,” Velte recalled. “It really galvanized me as an activist to say, ‘I need to be a lawyer, not a women’s studies Ph.D.,’ which was where I was headed.”

Peter Knight sat directly across from Velte, No. 36 in the general-public line. He is 37 years old, which makes him one of Georgetown University Law Center’s oldest second-year students.

“I read a case while working at Guantanamo Bay, and I didn’t understand it,” Knight said. The detainee’s lawyers got their client habeas rights “and I was in shock.”

The case was Boumediene v. Bush, handed down in June 2008. Between 2005 and 2009, Knight served two tours in Iraq with the Army before working as an interrogator in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility in 2009.

“The way [Boumediene] came down, I respected the argument, but I was a government contractor and before that I was in the military and had been overseas serving. So for me, it was like, ‘Wait a second, I’m not sure I fully agree but I can see now how they got to that decision,’” Knight said. “But seeing what the lawyer was able to do with the law blew my mind, to the point where the next day I was thinking about going to law school.”

‘Too big to miss’

Knight’s first-hand experience with the court’s biggest recent national security case turned him on to appellate law and, with it, the fight for same-sex marriage rights, even if it costs him his grades. “I have five finals in the next two weeks. That’s school, but this is education. This is too big to miss. Hopefully, it doesn’t reflect on my grades, but it would take a Category 5 hurricane to pull me away from my seat,” Knight said.

“We haven’t seen something like this since Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board [of Education],” said Knight, referring to the landmark civil rights rulings with which Warren Court struck down interracial marriage bans in 1967 and segregation in 1954, respectively. “I’m all about equality and I feel like America should be all about equality, and hopefully the Supreme Court finds that the equal-protection clause is all about equality, as well.”

Knight was among the vast majority of marriage equality supporters enduring the elements before Tuesday morning’s oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, which asks whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to issue same-sex marriage licenses and recognize those issued by other states.

“There might be one or two amongst us that are with the states’ rights, but the overwhelming majority are for marriage equality,” Knight said. “There have been some dissenters that came out on Saturday. It was civil. It was respectful.”

Between the two lines on Monday afternoon, nary a word against same-sex marriage could be heard. One line-waiter getting paid to hold a spot for a member of the Supreme Court bar proved a double exception: While the rest of his many temporary colleagues refused to answer any questions from the press, this man gladly told reporters that marriage should be between a man and a woman and anything else is “sinful in the eyes of God.” Whose place in line he was holding? He did not know.

Perry Thompson, the court’s director of admissions for the Supreme Court bar, came out to answer questions. He said that “approximately 60” seats were reserved for bar members along with an additional 100 or so in the lawyer’s lounge where argument audio would be broadcast. “General-public normally gets about 50 people in there for sure,” Thompson said.

That meant that Mark Phariss and Vic Holmes, 49th and 50th in line and two of the plaintiffs challenging Texas’s ban on same-sex marriage that was argued at the Fifth Circuit in January, were the last ones guaranteed to get in. Though they had come around a couple times to scope the scene outside the court, they would take their places in line on Tuesday morning, said American University sophomores Michael Caballero, 20, and Anna Walsh, 19, who had been holding the plaintiffs’ coveted turf since Sunday afternoon after taking over from another set of stand-ins.

Nick Lewis, 68th in line, arrived at 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon from Atlanta to take his place at what was by that point the end of the line. A man who refused to be named had just finished telling Lewis that the first 67 people got in for oral arguments during 2013’s United States v. Windsor, the case that took down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and inspired a streak of lower court victories against states’ same-sex marriage bans.

Still, Lewis didn’t seem fazed when the man took his name down for an unofficial record keeping. He had just missed the cutoff in March for this term’s other blockbuster, King v. Burwell, the challenge for the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but just as he was about to leave, several audience members left, allowing Lewis access to the entire argument.

His carefree attitude extended to his apparel. Unlike the bundled, huddled masses camping out with their lawn chairs and inflatable mattresses, Lewis wore a three-piece suit and a purple shirt—with no change of clothes, food or shelter to keep him comfortable on the cold concrete.

“I’m gonna tough it out,” Nick Lewis said.

Thanks to the Oyez Project, Lewis was listening to the recordings from the oral arguments in Loving and Romer, the cases that form the bedrock marriage and gay rights precedents that Tuesday’s challengers have built their cases on. “Oyez, oh yeah,” Lewis said.

Wyatt Fore, a 3L at University of Michigan Law School who worked with the plaintiffs’ lawyers on the Michigan challenge consolidated into Tuesday’s case, arrived Friday at 10:30 p.m., just early enough to be within the first 50 in the general public line. But even those who get inside, especially those in the end of the line, may find their views obstructed by the courtroom’s massive marble pillars.

But that’s not getting in his way. “If people think that a marble column is going to stop us instead of the rain for the last four days, they have another thing coming,” Fore, 28, said.

Fore plans on coming back in June for the opinion announcement, though he’s staying coy on when, exactly, he plans to return lest he not make it in for the big decision. “We don’t want any gate crashers, so that’s classified,” he said.

IMAGE: People wait in line outside the U.S. Supreme Court the day before arguments in the cases involving same-sex marriage. April 27, 2015. Photo: Mike Sacks/NLJ

For more on this story go to: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202724695602/The-Waiting-Game-Lined-Up-For-the-Gay-Marriage-Cases#ixzz3YcID1otZ