Will the Supreme Court overturn gay marriage?

The core reason this outcome remains possible is that the legal foundation of Obergefell is not especially secure in the current Supreme Court environment. A conservative supermajority has already shown willingness to revisit and overturn long-standing constitutional precedent when the majority believes the prior decision was wrongly reasoned, and Justice Thomas has explicitly signaled interest in reconsidering substantive due process cases. If a clean case reaches the Court with the right posture, there is a real, nontrivial pathway to reversal or narrowing, especially if the justices are willing to treat marriage equality as analogous to the abortion precedent that was undone in Dobbs.

Against that, overturning marriage equality is politically and institutionally much harder than it may first appear. Obergefell has been deeply embedded in law and society for a decade, with millions of marriages and a broad public expectation of stability. The Court usually treats reliance interests as a serious constraint, and a direct reversal would create immediate disruption with little precedent for a clean fix through Congress or the states. Even many conservative justices may prefer to avoid a seismic, highly visible reversal that would trigger major backlash and call the Court’s legitimacy into question.

Compared with the current market price, I think the market is somewhat too confident on No. A 7% Yes price implies an event that is close to a long shot, but the combination of the Court’s present composition, the post-Dobbs willingness to revisit settled rights, and the possibility of a carefully chosen test case makes the true risk somewhat higher than that. Still, this is not a high-probability event because the Court would have to decide to take an extraordinary step, so I would not push the probability into the high teens or beyond.