Same-sex marriage doesn’t take effect in Maryland until next year, but a case today in the state’s top courthouse is considering one of the inevitable results of some marriages—divorce.

The Maryland Court of Appeals is hearing arguments today from lawyers representing a lesbian couple who were married in California but later decided to split up. The couple petitioned a Maryland judge for a divorce in 2010, but the request was refused on the grounds that their marriage was not permitted under Maryland law, the Associated Press reports.

The couple, Jessica Port and Virginia Anne Cowan, were married in 2008 during a brief period in which California legalized same-sex marriage. That window was shut that November after the passage of Proposition 8, but marriages that occurred before the vote on that ballot measure remained legal.

Thing is, the AP notes, Maryland honors marriages from other states even if they would not be permitted to take place within the confines of the Old Line State:

For example, Maryland law bars an uncle and a niece from marrying, but the state will recognize that marriage if it legally occurred in another state. The state also has no express prohibition banning the recognition of same-sex marriages from other states, lawyers wrote.

But if the Court of Appeals refuses Port and Cowan’s petition and tells them to wait until 2013 when Maryland’s same-sex marriage law goes into effect, they could go back to California, which while still not granting same-sex marriages, will grant divorces to gay and lesbian couples married there but who have since moved to a jurisdiction that won’t allow them to separate. The D.C. Council passed a similar bill last month.