This Is What It's Like to Document the Past, Present, and Future of Same-Sex Marriage

BERKELEY, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 6, 2015) - With same-sex marriage now legal across the United States, Nolo, a long-time publisher of do-it-yourself legal guides for consumers, has assembled a retrospective on its multi-decade effort to monitor laws that affect the LGBT community.

In the piece, published today on Nolo.com, Frederick Hertz, co-author of Nolo's A Legal Guide for Lesbian & Gay Couples, looks back on the many changes to laws affecting same-sex couples in the United States.

Highlights include:

• Early efforts to warn LGBT couples about which states considered same-sex relations a criminal act as late as the 1970s.
• Initial "marriage" guides that focused on ending opposite-sex marriages but did not mention same-sex marriage as an option.
• The intense legal complexities caused by rapid change on the same-sex marriage front, including discrepancies between state and federal laws, tax issues, and same-sex divorce issues.
• The concept of "discrimination in the form of legal complexity" that existed until last month's landmark Supreme Court ruling.

Mr. Hertz's retrospective can be found at http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/same-sex-marriage-past-present-future.html. Mr. Hertz is available for interviews on all aspects of same-sex marriage law during this exciting period in LGBT history. Please contact the Nolo Media Relations office to arrange an interview.

About Nolo
Nolo (www.nolo.com) is a leading provider of plain-English legal information and products for consumers and businesses. A subsidiary of Internet Brands, Nolo focuses most of its efforts on its award-winning websites, which feature extensive free content, online tools and a consumer-friendly lawyer directory. Nolo also develops market-leading software, online legal forms, and print and ebooks.

Nolo was founded in 1971 by two legal aid attorneys who set out to demystify the law for people who couldn't afford lawyers. Since then Nolo has produced over 20 million plain-English legal guides across all areas of the law.