Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Vallejos and Daniel Domingo appealed their cases to the Court of Final Appeal, and were respectively assigned the case numbers FACV 19 and 20/2012. They would be represented before the CFA by Michael Fordham; David Pannick continued to represent the Government. Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma rejected a further application for joinder by eight-year-old Liang Wing-ki, the Hong Kong-born daughter of mainland parents, whose next friend, mother Li Yinxian, filed suit on her behalf. Philip Dykes, for the applicant, argued that because Vallejos and Domingo's case would touch on issues of interpretation of the Basic Law under Article 158, Liang's interests would also be affected. In rejecting Liang's application, Ma stated: "We feel that the points you seem to argue are adequately covered and will be adequately covered". Liang and other Hong Kong-born children like her were ruled to be entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong in the 2001 case "Director of Immigration v. Chong Fung Yuen".
Sevcik v. Sandoval
Attorneys for the plaintiffs filed an appeal on December 3, 2012 with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court originally planned to hear the case on a parallel track with a similar Hawaii same-sex marriage case, "Jackson v. Abercrombie", until Hawaii's legalization of same-sex marriage as of December 2, 2013, mooted that case. The Court placed the case on hold pending the Supreme Court rulings in "Hollingsworth v. Perry" and "United States v. Windsor" on June 26, 2013. The Coalition for the Protection of Marriage on December 5, 2012, filed a petition for certiorari before judgment with the Supreme Court, asking that court to take up the case without waiting for action by the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court denied that petition on June 27, 2013. On October 18, 2013, Lambda Legal filed its opening brief. On January 21, 2014, the state of Nevada submitted its reply brief. On January 24, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto announced she was reviewing the state's brief because the Ninth Circuit's decision in "SmithKline Beecham Corporation v. Abbott Laboratories" on January 21 established that laws that make a distinction based on sexual orientation are subject to "heightened scrutiny", making the arguments that state had made based on the less demanding "rational basis" standard "likely no longer tenable in the Ninth Circuit." On February 10, Masto withdrew the state's brief defending Nevada's ban on same-sex marriage. Governor Sandoval agreed: "It has become clear that this case is no longer defensible in court". On February 12, 2014, the Ninth Circuit issued an order vacating the previous order scheduling the "Sevcik" and "Jackson" cases together.