Court watchers are predicting that the Supreme Court will strike down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) but don't expect an all-inclusive ruling.

The court will hand down rulings this month in two cases related to gay marriage, possibly as soon as Monday.

DOMA's prohibition on federal agencies to recognize the legal marriages of gay couples cost Edith Windsor more than $360,000 after the death of her wife Thea Spyer.

The women shared their lives for 44 years and married in Toronto, Canada in 2007. In 2009, New York began recognizing the marriages of gay couples, although gay couples could not enter such unions in the Empire State until 2011. Spyer died in 2009.

In Hollingsworth v. Perry, the court is being asked to decide whether California's Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment which limits marriage to heterosexual unions, is unconstitutional.

A broad ruling striking down Proposition 8 would affect the entire nation. But more likely, experts say, is a narrow decision that would limit the expansion of such rights to California.

“It will really move us forward without going all the way,” Mitchell Katine, a lawyer who worked on Lawrence v. Texas, the groundbreaking case which struck down sodomy laws, told USA Today.

Gary Polland, a Houston attorney who defended Texas' law in Lawrence, appeared to agree.

“I think it's going to be an incremental move, whatever it is,” Polland said. “This court doesn't want to be in the position of making political decisions for the country.”

“I think there's a better chance of the people of California winning it all than there is of the country being placed under a constitutional regime requiring the creation of gay marriage,” Teresa Collett, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told the paper.