Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval has dropped the state's opposition to a federal lawsuit seeking to strike down a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage.

In a motion filed Monday on the governor's behalf in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said the state's arguments in support of a 2002 amendment to Nevada's constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman were “no longer sustainable” in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's partial overturn last year of the Defense of Marriage Act and a recent 9th Circuit ruling in a dispute over juror selection.

“Based upon the advice of the Attorney General's office and their interpretation of relevant case law, it has become clear that this case is no longer defensible in court,” Gov. Sandoval said in a statement emailed to Business Insurance.

Eight gay and lesbian couples have asked a three-judge panel of the appellate court to reverse a U.S. District Court judge's dismissal of their lawsuit — Sevcik v. Sandoval against the state of Nevada. They sued in April 2012 after they were denied marriage licenses in Clark, Washoe and Carson counties. The couples argue the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates equal protection and due process guarantees under the U.S. Constitution.

In a brief filed on Jan. 24 opposing the couples' appeal, Ms. Masto argued that laws regarding the application of rights and privileges according to sexual orientation only require a rational basis for their justification, and that the state's same-sex marriage ban was permissible under that standard of review.

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However, on the same day the Nevada attorney general filed her brief in support of the state's marriage ban, a separate three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit ruled in SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories that potential jurors could not be precluded from service based on their sexual orientation, and that laws differentiating civil rights on that basis are owed a “heightened scrutiny” exceeding the standard Nevada had applied to its justification for the marriage ban.

In her motion to withdraw the state's opposition to the lawsuit challenging the ban, Ms. Masto said the Jan. 24 appeals court's ruling — coupled with the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2013 decision in United States v. Windsor — had undermined the state's position to the point that it “cannot withstand legal scrutiny.”

“When the federal district court decided this case in November 2012, the law regarding treatment of same-sex couples under traditional marriage laws was uncertain,” Ms. Masto said in a statement released on Monday. “But the legal landscape has since changed.”

The couples seeking to overturn the same-sex marriage ban also filed a motion on Monday asking the appellate court to expedite oral arguments in the case, noting the state's withdrawal of its opposition leaves the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, a Las Vegas-based conservative advocacy group, as the law's sole defender.

“The only party left advocating for Nevada's exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is a third-party intervener, with no direct stake in the outcome and nothing more than a 'generalized grievance' about the plaintiffs' claims,” the couples said in their motion.

They added that, while the appellate court's 2013 decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry allows the case to proceed because the marriage ban remains in place, the absence of an affirmative defense of the ban by the state “makes any delay in the plaintiffs securing the relief they seek particularly intolerable.”