“Moreover, to succeed on a substantive due process challenge, a plaintiff must do more than show that the legislature's stated assumptions are irrational — he must discredit any conceivable basis which could be advanced to support the challenged provision, regardless of whether that basis has a foundation in the record… or actually motivated the legislature. . . . Otherwise stated, once the legislature's action has been shown to have some plausible rationale, a court's inquiry is at an end.”
Beatie v. New York City
Beatie v. City of New York, 123 F.3d 707, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1997.
- United States
- Sep 2, 1997
- United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
Parties
Legislation Cited
Related Documents
Type of Litigation
Tobacco Control Topics
Substantive Issues
Type of Tobacco Product
“Over 20 years later, while discussing the line legislatures must sometimes draw he said, presciently, again in a dissent, 'when it is seen that a line or point there must be, and that there is no mathematical or logical way of fixing it precisely, the decision of the legislature must be accepted unless we can say that it is very wide of any reasonable mark.’”
Plaintiff, an attorney and self-described cigar aficionado, claimed that the City of New York's Smoke-Free Air Act (Act), prohibiting the use of tobacco products in public places, should not apply to the smoking of cigars because the existing evidence demonstrating the harms of environmental tobacco smoke pertained only to cigarettes. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York found that the measure applied to cigar smoke. The plaintiff appealed, claiming that the Act lacked a rational basis for its enactment and that the administrative process by which New York passed the Act violated the plaintiff's substantive due process rights. The United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, affirmed the constitutionality of extending the Act's prohibitions to include cigar smoke.