Last week, a three-judge panel on California’s Second District Court of Appeals revived a case brought by a group of Los Angeles firefighters who challenged the City of Los Angeles’ Covid-19 vaccine mandate. The decision reversed a lower court’s ruling that dismissed the case because the judge found the firefighters’ allegations regarding the safety and efficacy of the Covid shots implausible, ignoring the settled rule that, at the pleading stage, judges must accept all factual allegations as true.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the lawyers representing the firefighters in this case and the lawyer primarily responsible for drafting the appeal.)
Although unpublished, the appellate court’s 53-page opinion marks a pivotal moment in the fallout from Covid policy. As I have written before, leftist institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the California judiciary have always championed individual freedom, even in emergency situations (“emergency” being a term of art that is subject to manipulation, of course). In fact, the lower-court judge in the firefighters’ case, Michael Linfield, wrote a book about this. He quoted two of the United States’ most liberal jurists, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, who wrote in a famous dissent that “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”
Unfortunately, the left abandoned their principles during the pandemic. We might have expected that from politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden, establishment puppets who lacked the discipline or intellectual curiosity to question public
