Sabrina Maurer's case involves her fight over death benefits and inheritance taxes after the 2013 death of her partner, Kim Underwood. Photo:

Sabrina Maurer's case involves her fight over death benefits and inheritance taxes after the 2013 death of her partner, Kim Underwood. Photo:

PHILADELPHIA — A judge has recognized a 2001 same-sex union as a common-law marriage in Pennsylvania even though one partner died before gay marriage became legal, a ruling that has family lawyers across the state buzzing about the potential implications.

Sabrina Maurer’s case involves her fight over death benefits and inheritance taxes — as well as access to their safety deposit box — after the 2013 death of Kim Underwood.

Bucks County Judge C. Theodore Fritsch Jr. found that the women retroactively qualify as common-law spouses because of their 2001 church union.

Underwood died a year before a federal judge ordered Pennsylvania to conduct same-sex marriages and recognize those performed earlier. Fritsch’s ruling Wednesday appears to extend that decision to include earlier common-law unions, at least in Bucks County.

“Is this going to create an avalanche of issues that are going to crop up?” said family lawyer Helen Casale, who helped the American Civil Liberties Union win the case that overturned the state’s gay marriage ban last year. “I think it’s very possible, for better or worse.”

The effects of Fritsch’s decision could also be thorny, especially if judges around the state concur. Courts would have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a common-law marriage applied, and whether petitioners should be granted alimony, marital assets, inheritance-tax refunds or even backdated marriage licenses.

To succeed, they would have to show they considered themselves married before the state’s common-law marriage provision ended on Jan. 1, 2005.

Maurer had an unusually strong case, her lawyer said.

She and Underwood had been married before 100 people in an Episcopal church in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 2001. They shared bank accounts and exchanged power of attorney. And Underwood’s parents, Michael and Patricia Underwood of Haddonfield, New Jersey, supported Maurer’s claim of survivorship.