Court Considering Whether Theaters May Reopen in N.Y. Alongside Churches
From The Clementine Company LLC v. Cuomo, filed Friday by Chief Judge Colleen McMahon (S.D.N.Y.):
[E]ight individually-owned “small venue theaters” {which have a median capacity of 144 seats} located in Manhattan seek preliminary and permanent injunctive relief preventing the defendants—Governor Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, and Mayor de Blasio—from enforcing Executive Order (“EO”) 202.3, which compelled New York’s theaters, among other enterprises, to cease operations indefinitely to hall the transmission of Covid-19. The plaintiffs argue that their equal protection rights are being violated because these artistic venues must remain closed, while EO 202.45 now permits “restaurants, catering halls, gyms, casinos, and shopping malls” to open subject to limited capacity and other social distancing requirements….
Presently before this Court is the plaintiffs’ motion for a mandatory preliminary injunction that would enjoin enforcement of EO 202.3 as against the small venue theaters and allow them to reopen. The moving and opposition briefs were filed before the United States Supreme Court entered an injunction pendente lite in the case of Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York (2020), which is presently pending before the Second Circuit….
As Justice Kavanaugh said in his concurrence in Diocese, “judicial deference in an emergency or a cri
Article from Latest – Reason.com
