Page "Baker v. Vermont" Paragraph 10

Addressing the issue of remedy, the court declined to grant outright the plaintiffs ' request for a marriage license, and instead focused on correcting the acknowledged inequities of the existing statutes.

Stipulating that " some future case may attempt to establish that notwithstanding equal benefits and protections under Vermont law — the denial of a marriage license operates per se to deny constitutionally-protected rights ," the court decided that this was not the issue being addressed by the case at hand.

Instead, the court laid out a set of directives requiring the State to implement some system whereby same-sex couples would be granted equivalent statutory rights and privileges to male-female couples.

This system could be implemented via the modification of the marriage statutes to allow for same-sex marriages, or it might be implemented via some system of " domestic partnership " arrangements ( the solution eventually adopted by the legislature.

) In making this decision, some members of the court complained that they were unnecessarily " abdicating " their constitutional duty to implement the most straightforward remedy, while the others responded that with this decision they had done a great deal, and the remaining decisions were political in nature.