[3] Because the case came to the Supreme Court through mandatory appellate review (not certiorari), the dismissal constituted a decision on the merits and established Baker v. Nelson as precedent,[4] although the extent of its precedential effect had been subject to debate.

[6] On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court explicitly overruled Baker in Obergefell v. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.

Gerald Nelson, Clerk of District Court in Hennepin County, denied the request on the sole ground that the two were of the same sex.

The justices did not ask a single question during the oral argument to Baker and McConnell's lawyer or to the assistant county attorney who represented the clerk.

[15] This restriction, the Court reasoned, did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage.

It found the plaintiffs' reliance on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Loving v. Virginia, finding an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, failed to provide a parallel: "in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.

"[17] The Court acknowledged that Justice Goldberg's concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut, which argued that criminalizing the possession of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy, found support for marital privacy partly in the Ninth Amendment, but the Court distinguished Griswold and found no authority for the Ninth Amendment being binding on the states.

[20] In his "Motion to Dismiss Appeal and Brief", the Hennepin County Attorney argued, correctly, that the marriage license issued previously[21] made this case moot.

In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:[7]The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry.

Baker v. Nelson must be and now is overruled, and the State laws challenged by Petitioners in these cases are now held invalid to the extent they exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.During the pendency of the case, the plaintiffs Michael McConnell and Jack Baker[39] obtained a license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, and returned to Minneapolis to be married on 3 September 1971 by a minister from the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.