The First Department of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court has ruled 5-0 against NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban, in the case of In re New York Statewide Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, et al. v. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, et al. (The Hispanic Chambers opinion begins on page 22, following two other opinions released the same day.)
In New York State, the trial courts of general jurisdiction are the Supreme Court. The intermediate courts of appeal are the Appellate Division, which are divided into four geographic Departments, similar to the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal. The highest court is the Court of Appeals. Thus, Mayor Bloomberg has the option of trying to bring the case to the Court of Appeals.
The Appellate Division’s decision is quite straightforward: “[T]he Board [of Health] did not bring any scientific or health expertise to bear in creating the Portion Cap Rule. Indeed, the rule was drafted, written and proposed by the Office of the Mayor and submitted to the Board, which enacted it without substantive changes.” If the Board’s ban on the sale of sodas larger than 16 ounces were actually a health rule (similar, for example, to a ban on the sale of infected meat), there would not be so many exemptions for certain types of vendors.
The Appellate Division applied the four-part separation of powers test from Boreali v Axelrod, 71 NY2d 1 (1989). The Appellate Division summarized the four Boreali factors:
[...]First, Boreali found the PHC [Public Health Council] had engaged in the balancing of competing concerns of public health and economic costs, “acting solely on [its] own ideas of sound public policy”. Second, the PHC did not engage in the “interstitial” rule making typical of administrative