The actions have drawn less attention than congressional efforts to cut off funding for the law, or earlier state decisions to refuse to set up online insurance marketplaces or reject an expansion of Medicaid, which sharply limited the law's reach.
On Friday, a judge dismissed an appeal filed by the Norwalk Board of Education seeking to have an earlier state decision overturned.
Except in exceptional cases the grounds on which the circuit courts are held authorized to follow an earlier state decision rather than a later one, or to apply the rules of commercial law as understood by this court rather than those laid down by the local tribunals, are not grounds of constitutional right, but considerations of justice or expediency.
Samuel R. Bagenstos, a law professor at Washington University in St . Louis who argued the case for Mr. Goodman, called the decision "an important win". He said it was significant that the court did not insist, as it had in earlier state immunity decisions, on Congress having compiled a record of state constitutional violations in the area under scrutiny.
"Under these circumstances, the current inequality visited upon same-sex civil union couples offends the New Jersey Constitution, creates an incomplete set of rights that Lewis sought to prevent, and is not compatible with 'a reasonable conception of basic human dignity,' " she wrote, quoting from the earlier State Supreme Court decision.
The following year, lawyers Theodore B. Olson and David Boies brought a lawsuit arguing that California's voters had violated the U.S. Constitution when they overrode an earlier state Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
"Voters in the early states take these decisions very seriously," Mr. Prince said.
Justices are weighing whether to uphold a decision in May striking down the 2004 amendment and earlier state law as unconstitutional.
After the Atkins decision, Mr. Hall challenged his death sentence, relying in part on the earlier state-court determinations.
But officials in other states said Florida's move would only create more chaos around the nominating process, which has already been upended by other states' decisions to hold earlier primaries.
12. Several of this Court's early decisions stating that an invention is not complete until it has been reduced to practice are best understood as indicating that the invention's reduction to practice demonstrated that the concept was no longer in an experimental phase.
