In re Parentage of a Child by T.J.S. and A.L.S., 212 N.J. 334 (2012). As summarized in the syllabus (a convenient but admittedly not authoritative source), the issue was “whether the New Jersey Parentage Act (Act), N.J.S.A. 9:17-38 to -59, which provides that an infertile man is the father of a child born to his artificially inseminated wife, violates equal protection by not recognizing an infertile woman as the legal mother of her husband’s biological child born to a gestational carrier.” The Court split 3-3. Justice Hoens wrote a concurring opinion, in which Justice Patterson and Judge Wefing joined. Justice Albin filed a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Rabner and Justice Lavecchia.
As Justices Hoens and Albin both observed, the effect of an equally divided vote is to affirm the opinion of the Appellate Division. However, as noted in Mount Holly Tp. Bd. of Educ. v. Mount Holly Educ. Ass’n, 199 N.J. 319, 332 n.2 (2009), neither the concurring nor the dissenting opinion is precedential. As a result, as Justice Albin stated in the final sentence of his dissent, “[f]inal resolution of the equal-protection issue in this case must await another day.” Nonetheless, the concurrence becomes the controlling law for subsequent proceedings in this particular case, as the Court made clear in Green v. Jersey City Bd. of Educ., 177 N.J. 434, 442 n.3 (2003).