AUSTIN – Just after New Orleans officially kicks off Carnival season 2015, Texas gay marriage and abortion activists will descend on the Crescent City to hear oral arguments in two landmark cases facing the region’s top appeals court.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments about the constitutionality of Texas’ tough new abortion restrictions on Jan. 7. The law passed in 2013, known as House Bill 2, banned abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, placed heavy new restrictions on clinics and doctors who perform the procedure and made it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion using a pill.

The court has twice reversed lower court orders that found HB2 unconstitutional. But abortion providers were in-part heartened after the U.S. Supreme Court put on hold for some clinics and doctors a number of the law’s most stringent mandates.

On Jan. 9, the same three-judge panel will tackle both Texas and Louisiana’s constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. In February, San Antonio-based U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled Texas’ ban unconstitutional because it violated gay couples’ 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the governor-elect, appealed the ruling to the New Orleans-based appeals court.

Gay marriage is currently legal in 34 states and the District of Columbia. An October ruling upholding Ohio’s gay marriage ban, the first of its kind from a federal appeals court, will likely force the U.S. Supreme Court to review the issue once again.