American Foundation for Equal Rights

Newsweek: Gay Marriage: The Case from the Left

David Boies, Ted Olson’s partner in the fight to overturn California’s Proposition 8, in a landmark gay-marriage trial that starts this week, has a long history of civil-rights battles and courtroom victories. Their teamwork math is simple: Olson is the conservative and Boies is the liberal. Both lawyers tell Newsweek that by combining forces they hope to erase the idea that gay marriage is a liberal or a conservative issue. It is, they argue, simply one of equal rights for individual Americans.

Boies served as special trial counsel for the Justice Department’s successful antitrust suit against Microsoft during the Clinton administration, and he has recently argued several high-profile antitrust cases. He argued on the side of Al Gore in the 2000 Supreme Court battle for the presidency, losing to Olson, who represented Bush. “I’d always rather be on the side of Ted Olson,” says Boies, of his longtime friend. When Democrats in the Senate were balking at Olson’s appointment as Bush’s solicitor general, Boies went to bat for him. “I spoke to [Senate Democrats] and urged them to confirm him,” recalls Boies.

Both he and Olson each day navigate small physical limitations. Olson is colorblind and Boies is dyslexic, admitting he is not great at names and “numbers still reverse.” But Boies’s learning disability has hardly limited his intellectual victories. “Names and numbers are not the most important, it’s the principles and policies and things from which to construct an argument,” he says of arguing high-level case law.

Read the rest of Eve Conant’s Newsweek article here.