Half-uncles and half-nieces are now free to get hitched, New York state's highest court declared Tuesday according to the New York Post.

While it's still illegal for full-blooded uncles and nieces to marry, a six-judge Court of Appeals panel agreed that the DNA shared between such half relatives, only one-eighth, is not enough to pose a risk to future generations.

"Genetic risk in a half-uncle, half-niece relationship is half what it would be if the parties were related by the full blood," the panel wrote according to the NY Post.

In other words, the same relationship would be akin to marrying a cousin, "which has been allowed in New York state for well over 100 years," said lawyer Michael Marszalkowski, who represented a Vietnamese woman who challenged the law.

The woman, Huyen Nguyen, brought the case when an immigration judge tried to deport her after ruling her 2000 marriage to her husband in Rochester, New York, was invalid. Nguyen's husband is her mother's half-brother.

Appeals Court Judge Robert Smith noted in his ruling that until 1893, it was legal in New York state for half-uncles and half-aunts to marry their nieces and nephews, the NY Post reported. The original state Domestic Relations Law defines an incestuous marriage as one between "1. An ancestor and a descendant; 2. A brother and sister of either the whole or half-blood; 3. An uncle and niece or an aunt and nephew."

The appeals court agreed with Marszalkowski's argument that unions between half-relatives are not incestuous according to the law's wording.

While laws against "parent-child and brother-sister marriages...are grounded in the almost universal horror with which such marriages are viewed...there is no comparably strong objection to uncle-niece marriages," the court ruled.

Marszalkowski said he was happy for his clients, who are still married after 14 years and live in Rochester. The two do not have children.

But some conservatives are concerned about the social implications the ruling might have.   

"If governments' only interest in marriage is who loves each other, than what logical stopping point is there?" Reverend Jason McGuire, executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, told the New York Daily News.