Vaughn Richard Walker is an American lawyer who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California from 1989 to 2011. Walker presided over the original trial in Hollingsworth v. Perry, where he found California's Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional.
Vaughn Walker
Walker's official portrait
Walker in 2008 speaking to the Pacific Research Institute
Hollingsworth v. Perry was a series of United States federal court cases that re-legalized same-sex marriage in the state of California. The case began in 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which found that banning same-sex marriage violates equal protection under the law. This decision overturned California ballot initiative Proposition 8, which had banned same-sex marriage. After the State of California refused to defend Proposition 8, the official sponsors of Proposition 8 intervened and appealed to the Supreme Court. The case was litigated during the governorships of both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, and was thus known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger and Perry v. Brown, respectively. As Hollingsworth v. Perry, it eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which held that, in line with prior precedent, the official sponsors of a ballot initiative measure did not have Article III standing to appeal an adverse federal court ruling when the state refused to do so.
A demonstration in front of the Supreme Court on the day of oral arguments