Legal challenges to Gov. David A. Paterson’s plan to recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions are likely to come thick and fast. But they face an uphill fight, legal experts said on Thursday, given New York’s unusual legal terrain.

The plan, issued by the governor’s office in a memorandum on May 14, was, for starters, in one sense, unremarkable. The usual idea, after all, is that married couples who move from one state to another remain married, and New York is not among the many states with constitutional provisions or statutes that expressly forbid the recognition of same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.

“This is the normal rule,” Suzanne Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia, said of New York’s approach, “and what is unusual is what has happened in most of the rest of the country.”

For more than a year, the state’s Department of Civil Service has provided health benefits to same-sex couples who were married in other jurisdictions, and some localities have similar policies. State courts have rejected challenges to the policies.