New York Times

WASHINGTON — The first page of a petition seeking Supreme Court review is the most important. It sets out the “question presented,” the one the court will answer if it takes the case.

The justices do not ordinarily tinker with the wording of those questions. But on Friday something unusual happened: In agreeing to hear four same-sex marriage cases, the court framed for itself the issues it would address.

Lawyers and scholars scrutinized the court’s order with the anxious intensity of hypochondriacs attending their symptoms. Some saw an attempt by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to elicit a ruling that would stop short of establishing a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The court’s order was not issued until 3:30 in the afternoon, long after the justices’ private morning conference concluded. That suggested the drafting had taken some time and had involved some negotiation.

Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, did not like what he saw. Has the Supreme Court “stacked the deck against gay marriage in how it has framed the question?” he asked in a blog post.

But there are perfectly innocuous explanations for the court’s new questions. It agreed to hear four different petitions, from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, and they featured different questions, which needed to be harmonized since the cases were consolidated.

“The court’s order represents good housekeeping,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard.

But Professor Tribe also voiced a small note of caution.

“The rephrased questions,” he said, “technically leave open a middle path along which the court would prevent states from discriminating against same-sex couples lawfully married in their home states without requiring any state to take the affirmative step of issuing its own marriage licenses to same-sex couples.”

Such a ruling would be modeled on the court’s 2013 decision in United States v. Windsor, which struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, and required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages from states that allowed such unions. The Windsor decision did not, however, require any state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The court’s rephrased questions would potentially allow a similar decision. That would amount to “taking just one short step beyond the court’s invalidation of DOMA rather than moving all the way to full equality,” Professor Tribe said. “But I doubt that the court will in the end stop with that half-measure.”

In its order, the court split the case in two, scheduling separate arguments over the right to marry and the right to have out-of-state marriages recognized.

The court will hear a 90-minute argument on the first question and an hour on the second one. If the arguments proceed in that sequence, the proceedings may seem disjointed, as establishing a right to same-sex marriage would make the question of recognizing out-of-state marriages moot.

Some were puzzled by the court’s language in the new questions. They invoked, as the petitions had, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection. But some saw a subtle shift of emphasis, away from the rights of people seeking to get married and toward the obligations the amendment imposes on states.

The court’s first question: “Does the 14th Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?”

The second: “Does the 14th Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?”

Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, said the wording was at first blush was “a bit odd.”

“After all,” he wrote in a blog post, “one might think that the answer to both questions is no, so long as the state doesn’t license or recognize any marriages, same-sex or opposite-sex.

“But in fact, the states all do license and recognize opposite-sex marriages, so the objection is academic,” he added. “Moreover, under the court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence, states probably cannot simply deny marriage to everyone.”

Susan Sommer, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, said the court’s decision to review four petitions and two discrete issues was a welcome development for advocates of gay rights.

“It’s a good sign that they took all of the cases,” she said. “It demonstrates that these cases are going to cover the breadth of the pressing issues.”

Indeed, she said, the petitions challenging bans on the recognition of out-of-state marriages were woven through with the stories of gay couples and families who had faced hardships.

They include parents who sought to be listed on birth and adoption certificates, surviving spouses whose out-of-state marriages were not recognized and a funeral director barred from noting same-sex marriages on death certificates.

“When you put all the cases together,” Ms. Sommer said, “you have an incredibly dramatic look at all of the cradle-to-grave harms.”

A decision resolving the questions the Supreme Court presented itself with on Friday is expected by the end of June.