On May 29, 2020, the Supreme Court denied an injunction in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom . The Court’s order was a single sentence. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a solo concurrence that stretched about two pages. According to Westlaw, 114 cases have cited the Chief’s concurrence. (I cited many of these cases in my Harvard JLPPP article ). And only one of those case has negatively referenced the opinion. In six months, South Bay may have become Chief Justice Roberts’s most influential precedent during his entire tenure on the Court. To be sure, Roberts has written many important decisions. But those cases affected discrete controversies. NFIB v. Sebelius resolved the constitutionality of the ACA. Shelby County v. Holder resolved the status of the Voting Rights Act. The Census and DACA cases resolved controversies specific to the Trump era. And so on. But his South Bay concurrence settled cases of first impressions that have spanned across the entire spectrum of constitutional adjudication. Courts have cited South Bay in cases involving every facet of the Bill of Rights: the Freedom of Speech, the Free Exercise of Religion, Freedom of Association, the Second Amendment, various criminal procedure rights (such as […]
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