(PRINCETON, N.J.) – The state Supreme Court is expected within the next week to rule on the legality of same-sex marriage. If the court rules for the plaintiffs in the case, known as Lewis v Harris, New Jersey would be the second state in the country to allow such unions.

Several legal scholars and political insiders expect the court — known to be among the more activist in the country on social issues and individual rights — to find that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry in the state.

“The New Jersey State Supreme Court has a history of taking risks in line with what they understand to be in the state constitution, and so one could very plausibly imagine that the case would be decided in favor of the seven gay and lesbian couples seeking to marry,” Princeton Justice Project president Tom Bohnett ’07 said.

The PJP wrote an amicus brief last fall, which the USG signed, on behalf of the seven plaintiffs in the case. In a campus-wide referendum, the undergraduate student body was asked whether the USG should side with the couples. A slim majority of students backed the brief, which was submitted to the court.

“I think our brief had a major impact, and I think it would be exciting, if [the plaintiffs] win the case, to know that we contributed to such a landmark decision,” Chris Lloyd ’06, former head of the Gay Family Rights Project of the PJP, said in an interview last night. “A lot of the issues the judges had discussed were issues addressed in our brief.”

The case was brought to the court by seven gay and lesbian couples who sued New Jersey officials after being denied marriage licenses, claiming that the officials violated the state constitution’s equal protection and privacy clauses. After losing the case in a 2-1 ruling of the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division in 2002, the couples appealed to the state Supreme Court.

New Jersey currently allows same-sex couples to enter into domestic partnerships, which provides them with some of the legal protections and rights afforded to heterosexual couples.

A Rutgers-Eagleton poll conducted this summer found that New Jerseyans support allowing gay couples to marry by a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent. A larger majority, 65 percent, said they supported civil unions that would give gays and lesbians “many of the same rights and benefits as a married man and woman,” while 30 percent were opposed.

The Anscombe Society, a student group that “define[s] marriage as the exclusive and monogamous union between a man and a woman,” responded to the PJP’s brief by filing its own with the court last spring. The group’s amicus brief was shorter and had about 30 signatures, said Sherif Girgis ’08, the group’s president.

“The vote came down in a pretty close split in favor of the USG signing onto the brief, so we didn’t think it reflected the opinion of the vast majority of Princetonians,” Girgis said in an interview. “We wanted a brief giving other people a chance to voice their opinion on the matter.”

Since the campus-wide referendum last fall, Girgis said he has noticed a general loss of interest among students on the gay marriage issue.

“I don’t know if I would call it apathy per se, it’s just people getting caught up in their own work,” Girgis said. “When the issue is brought to their attention, it is discussed, like last fall with the referendum, but otherwise, it takes the peripheral position that most of these stories take for people on a college campus.”

Bohnett, who is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian, agreed that “people can only focus on so many things at a time,” and said that right now, electoral politics probably occupies most of the average Princeton student’s consciousness about social and political issues.

He said, though, that interest in equal marriage rights is noticeable among LGBT students, who are directly affected by same-sex marriage laws in New Jersey, and said he thought that “once the ruling comes down, [the issue] will jump right to the forefront of people’s minds and the whole nation will be talking about it.”

The decision of Lewis is likely to be significant, whether or not the court rules in favor of the plaintiff. New Jersey could become the second state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriage, whose state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2003.

Alternatively, the court could mandate that the state follow the model of several other states, including Vermont, California and Connecticut, which allows civil unions for same-sex couples but forbids marriage.

The New Jersey court, however, could also rule to uphold the prohibition of same-sex marriage, as New York and Washington courts have done recently. More than 20 states have passed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and, in some cases, same-sex civil unions.

Gov. Jon Corzine has said that while he believes marriage is between a man and a woman, he would not oppose a decision from the court that ruled that marriage should include gay couples.

“If the Supreme Court rules that gay marriage is constitutional, the governor would not sign legislation to take away people’s rights,” Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the governor, told the Associated Press last week.