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NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

386 points by bananapear 4y ago

hitpointdrew 4y ago
Wow, NY finally does something right.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  This will get appealed. NY supreme court is just their basic trial court
  - Alupis 4y ago
    That may be, but it is really difficult to see how anyone will honestly make a case this was not government overreach, and an arbitrary overreach at that. We'll have to let it play out...
    - DannyBee 4y ago
      Which part? Speaking as a lawyer, reading this, it feels like it will be overturned almost immediately, and possibly reassigned to a different judge. There is very little legal analysis, and a large amount of unnecessary, biased, diatribe. Appeals courts rarely look kindly on that.
      - Alupis 4y ago
        All of it? I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason. To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better. Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong. So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal. This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.
        DannyBee 4y ago
        I actually have no view on the substance of the case. If the decision went the opposite way I would still give you the same view- legal decisions that are closer to political diatribes than they are well reasoned legal argument do not fair well on appeals. This is definitely in that category. It reads like an internet argument on Reddit, not a judicial decision
- daguava 4y ago
  They did something "right" alright - this will get smacked down by the next level.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  This will fail on appeal. NYC had every right to require vaccines.
  - hitpointdrew 4y ago
    No one, especially a government, has a right to require vaccines.
anm89 4y ago
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  Cheers!
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  - mrhands556 4y ago
    Difference in those are vaccinations that yield quality, long lasting immunity whereas the Covid vaccine is comparable to the flu vaccine in terms of effectiveness. Also, those are battle tested and widely accepted at this point, but the Covid vaccine was a type of vaccine that reached production for the first time with these.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Polio vaccine caused side-effects, up to and including polio. Every vaccine has carried some level of risk. I do think attitudes on that risk have changed over time though. (I have a relative who was in the first trials of polio vaccination, and I asked her if there was the same kind of reluctance to get it we were seeing with COVID. She smirked and said "Well, let me think... I was in private school, and we were having an indoor play day that day... Indoor because the plane was gonna fly over to spray the DDT and they didn't want us to get directly dusted... Anyway, no, all our parents wanted us to get it because they all personally knew someone, or someone who knew someone, in an iron lung and didn't want that for their kids").
  - thrown_22 4y ago
  - anm89 4y ago
    Yeah, it's really sad to see all the covid survivors in Iron lungs.
notRobot 4y ago
[pdf]
czinck 4y ago
Because it's confusing: the NY Supreme Court is just a trial court, it's not at all like the US Supreme Court. The top appellate court is called the Court of Appeals. It's called "supreme" because it has general jurisdiction, as opposed to things like traffic court.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  It is confusing because NY likes to be confusing. Almost every other state the State Supreme Court, is the top court of the state, just like the federal court And the Court of Appeals is lower than the State Supreme Court. Why NY needs to needless complicate everything is beyond me
  - jrockway 4y ago
    I guess it's because it's old. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court): > The New York Supreme Court is the oldest Supreme Court with general original jurisdiction. It was established as the Supreme Court of Judicature by the Province of New York on May 6, 1691. That court was continued by the State of New York after independence was declared in 1776. It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846. The name predates the US Supreme Court (in fact, predates the US itself), and many other state courts. Basically, someone changed the naming convention out from under them.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      it being old does not explain why it could not have been made into being the Top court.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      Thanks for digging this up. How cool!
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
widowlark 4y ago
- greymalik 4y ago
  Why?
- tptacek 4y ago
  Mail hn@ycombinator.com, don't post here about it.
jakogut 4y ago
Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place? The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by declaring nearly all public spaces "sensitive areas" in which licensed individuals may not carry for their protection. Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions? How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?
- widowlark 4y ago
  it's important to note that this is not the top court in new york, rather the beginning of the process of retrial and appeals. So, in effect, nothing will happen as a result of this ruling other than more appeals
- SllX 4y ago
  The consequences in theory are political. Theoretically Congress should be impeaching Presidents and expelling members that do not uphold their oaths. Executing consequences into popular Presidents or other members of Congress would also be politicized and have political consequences for Congress, so it doesn’t happen. That said, leaving impeachment or expulsion of legislative members to the Courts would also give them too much power. So the real consequences are at election time. If you ran to retain your seat, and lost, that’s your comeuppance. It’s not granular, but it gets the job done eventually. This is also why control of the White House flips back and forth so much: nothing any President does is particularly popular most of the time, they just have the votes to do it. Incumbents do get massive advantages in staying power but in the present day, two terms looks like about the maximum we would be able to tolerate a President’s political party in the Oval Office and typically after midterms they no longer have the votes in Congress either. Most of this is generally applicable to the States, but I don’t know New York politics specifically but would note that the previous Governor was put into a position where he was pretty much forced to resign both for scandals and for the actions he took while in office; and that was a slow slow build up.
tptacek 4y ago
This is a confusing headline. The judgement here is in NY state court, and pertains to employees of and in the City of New York, which enacted a vaccine requirement for employees of the city and later private employers in the city. Months later, Eric Adams was elected mayor of NYC, and he issued an executive order exempting athletes, performers, and artists from the mandate. Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.
- bananapear 4y ago
  Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    It doesn't, that's the point. The mandate presumably would have been legal if Adams hadn't added those arbitrary exemptions.
    - busymom0 4y ago
      Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued): > “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.” Source: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=JK5E3gx5XV1/ku37jnWR_PLUS_w==&system=prod&TSPD_101_R0=08533cd43fab2000a714a7fbca6ed5d92c9e780c98ea524c4b9b8701764b487905955c017542ac48080139dd47144800dda62d59b1ba02692121c6b4f86f53b4130e01eca4d9e4b1c8054784ce120d336736ccac0abbaf37b8d4ad9aa7103ddbd641ea04a53032d77d7903f1ad7a1b06abd1dac1cfde96f2 https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...
warbler73 4y ago
aaomidi 4y ago
Back pay? Seriously? I thought people weren’t happy about executive power through judicial means, but I’m seeing that same group of people celebrate this. Also note: the NY Supreme Court is actually the lowest court level in NY. Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Courts exist to make people whole. The court decided the executive branch didn't have the right to fire the workers. Because of that, the workers lost their jobs, insurance, and pay. How else would you suggest the court make them whole again?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  The judicial branch is not in the executive or legislative branch. Courts can invalidate laws and regulations from the executive or legislative branches. It is called Checks & Balances. It has kept power distributed for almost 250 years, preventing it from becoming concentrated in any one branch of government. Should that occur, you'd have bad actors enacting a one-party tyrannical state and tens of millions would die, mostly through starvation, but a good many through a state apparatus. It is familiar music. Our civilization has had to deal with such bad actors for a very long time, but despite the lessons of the past, there are still some who desire the one-party state. There is no sign that we, as a species, has completely eliminated the lust for power that's innate in humanity. It is for this reason that the founding fathers hard-coded such things into our nation which act as a stop-gap for tyrants.
- prottog 4y ago
  > Articles like this are being misleading on purpose. Maybe your complaint should be with the State of New York for having such a misleading name for their lowest-level trial court, and not the OP for literally referring to it by its name ;-)
tb_technical 4y ago
They took people's livelyhoods away, and now they gotta pay.
- hammock 4y ago
  This idea seems to be exactly the essence of the ruling. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
  - tb_technical 4y ago
    People were coping and seething while (not actually) working at their FANG jobs. Later I got voted up from people who got back from (actual) work, who read HN
- Maursault 4y ago
  They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination. The resistance to vaccination is entirely political. The mandate was not, but instead in the interests of public safety and health. Easing the mandate for special cases was a terrible decision. The decision to ease the mandate should be reversed, not the mandate itself. So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.
  - xfitm3 4y ago
    A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics. The mandate should have never existed.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      - gruez 4y ago
hash872 4y ago
I've been thinking a lot about judicial review in common law democracies recently, and I tentatively think a better system would be to vastly expand the number of judges that are involved in making a decision. Example, you'd still have a tiered court system, and your case would still be heard in front of say a 3-9 panel appeals court- but after they write their decisions, a couple hundred other appeals judges at the same level get to a simple cast up or down vote on the decision, remotely. That way the case is decided by a larger, more stable pool of qualified judges- it's not like 1 judge dies, is replaced by the other party, and now that appeals court starts issuing totally partisan decisions the other way on a 5-4 vote. It would hopefully make the judiciary overall less partisan, less of a high-stakes affair to nominate an appeals judge, and less swinging back and forth between 5-4 Democratic or Republican votes
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I have a feeling this would make things considerably more political. If you don’t like what judges decide, get people elected who will write things clearly into law. If they can’t do that, it sucks, go fix the political situation and stop trying to fix that dysfunction by making major systematic changes.
  - hash872 4y ago
    >get people elected who will write things clearly into law You can pass whatever law you'd like now- the existing judiciary can simply decide that it doesn't apply or isn't 'constitutional', and their decisions aren't reviewable. It's awarding ultimate power in society to a very small group The vast majority of developed countries don't work this way, at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty At a minimum, calling a law 'unconstitutional' should require a supermajority out of a fairly large body
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  I think you're just describing court packing because maybe you disagree with the outcome based on your partisan politics?
pseudolus 4y ago
FYI, the case was decided in Richmond County a/k/a Staten Island, arguably NYC's most conservative borough. The judge, a Republican, was elected in 2018. [0]. [0] https://ballotpedia.org/Ralph_Porzio https://ballotpedia.org/Ralph_Porzio
lettergram 4y ago
Fun fact NY Supreme Court is actually a lower level court in New York. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court So this will likely be challenged
Aunche 4y ago
I can understand why the vaccine mandate would be unconstitutional as a whole, but why shouldn't the city be allowed to fire whoever they feel like firing? New York is an at will state.
- ls15 4y ago
  - triceratops 4y ago
    I don't think you understand what "at will" means.
    - ls15 4y ago
      Where is that in the statement that I quoted?
- rasz 4y ago
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  "At will" doesn't mean you can fire for any reason. Even if you don't state the reason (which they did), it would be illegal to fire all black people from a company, because it's trivial to prove for a large enough company. "at will" doesn't supercede civil rights act and other laws.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    This is bad faith interpretation of my comment. We all know what the Civil Rights Act is. My question is what rule exactly is NYC breaking?
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      thats exactly what the court ruling explains
VagueMag 4y ago
1MachineElf 4y ago
Now how will we force people to do unpopular things without the ability to deprive them of their livelihood?
georgeplusplus 4y ago
What was wild is the amount of hate and vitriol directed towards those who chose not get to vaccinated and lost or risked losing their jobs. This forum was not exempt from that hate. I hope this court opinion is enough to sway the opinion of those who held such extreme beliefs in this vaccine mandate that there are different opinions, and it doesnt have to be so extreme when deciding how to move forward with things that affect peoples livelihoods. Sometimes you do what is best for you and I do what is best for me is a perfectly logical and sane reasoning.
- eganist 4y ago
  There wasn't hate, at least not broadly. There was anger, sure, but not hate. At the time the focus was on making sure the vaccinations were taken seriously so as to protect those who couldn't do it, and plenty of people instead made ideological and self-centered decisions (their right to do so) rather than compassionate and ethical ones.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    There wasn't broad levels of hate? Da fuq? People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels. People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all. Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
    - eganist 4y ago
      > There wasn't broad levels of hate? > Da fuq? > People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels. > People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all. > Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it. Right, that sounds like what I said earlier, mandmandam: "There was anger, sure, but not hate" - and you affirmed it; white-hot anger. And it was deserved. But broad hate, no. We just wanted people to be responsible. When you violate the social contract (protecting others by doing what's due), you attract anger. I'm not really here to debate it; anyone saying otherwise is spinning our anger for others' irresponsibility and others' putting the immunocompromised in danger.
fuckyah 4y ago
paulwilsondev 4y ago
another win for the anti-vaxxers
olliej 4y ago
Does that mean NY employees who don't want covid can stop working and still be paid?

386 points by bananapear 4y ago

hitpointdrew 4y ago

Wow, NY finally does something right.

DannyBee 4y ago
This will get appealed. NY supreme court is just their basic trial court
- Alupis 4y ago
  That may be, but it is really difficult to see how anyone will honestly make a case this was not government overreach, and an arbitrary overreach at that. We'll have to let it play out...
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    Which part? Speaking as a lawyer, reading this, it feels like it will be overturned almost immediately, and possibly reassigned to a different judge. There is very little legal analysis, and a large amount of unnecessary, biased, diatribe. Appeals courts rarely look kindly on that.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      All of it? I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason. To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better. Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong. So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal. This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.
      - DannyBee 4y ago
        I actually have no view on the substance of the case. If the decision went the opposite way I would still give you the same view- legal decisions that are closer to political diatribes than they are well reasoned legal argument do not fair well on appeals. This is definitely in that category. It reads like an internet argument on Reddit, not a judicial decision
daguava 4y ago
They did something "right" alright - this will get smacked down by the next level.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
This will fail on appeal. NYC had every right to require vaccines.
- hitpointdrew 4y ago
  No one, especially a government, has a right to require vaccines.

anm89 4y ago

upsidesinclude 4y ago
Cheers!
idiotsecant 4y ago
- mrhands556 4y ago
  Difference in those are vaccinations that yield quality, long lasting immunity whereas the Covid vaccine is comparable to the flu vaccine in terms of effectiveness. Also, those are battle tested and widely accepted at this point, but the Covid vaccine was a type of vaccine that reached production for the first time with these.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Polio vaccine caused side-effects, up to and including polio. Every vaccine has carried some level of risk. I do think attitudes on that risk have changed over time though. (I have a relative who was in the first trials of polio vaccination, and I asked her if there was the same kind of reluctance to get it we were seeing with COVID. She smirked and said "Well, let me think... I was in private school, and we were having an indoor play day that day... Indoor because the plane was gonna fly over to spray the DDT and they didn't want us to get directly dusted... Anyway, no, all our parents wanted us to get it because they all personally knew someone, or someone who knew someone, in an iron lung and didn't want that for their kids").
- thrown_22 4y ago
- anm89 4y ago
  Yeah, it's really sad to see all the covid survivors in Iron lungs.

notRobot 4y ago

[pdf]

czinck 4y ago

Because it's confusing: the NY Supreme Court is just a trial court, it's not at all like the US Supreme Court. The top appellate court is called the Court of Appeals. It's called "supreme" because it has general jurisdiction, as opposed to things like traffic court.

phpisthebest 4y ago
It is confusing because NY likes to be confusing. Almost every other state the State Supreme Court, is the top court of the state, just like the federal court And the Court of Appeals is lower than the State Supreme Court. Why NY needs to needless complicate everything is beyond me
- jrockway 4y ago
  I guess it's because it's old. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court): > The New York Supreme Court is the oldest Supreme Court with general original jurisdiction. It was established as the Supreme Court of Judicature by the Province of New York on May 6, 1691. That court was continued by the State of New York after independence was declared in 1776. It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846. The name predates the US Supreme Court (in fact, predates the US itself), and many other state courts. Basically, someone changed the naming convention out from under them.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    it being old does not explain why it could not have been made into being the Top court.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Thanks for digging this up. How cool!
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

widowlark 4y ago

greymalik 4y ago
Why?
tptacek 4y ago
Mail hn@ycombinator.com, don't post here about it.

jakogut 4y ago

Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place? The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by declaring nearly all public spaces "sensitive areas" in which licensed individuals may not carry for their protection. Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions? How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?

widowlark 4y ago
it's important to note that this is not the top court in new york, rather the beginning of the process of retrial and appeals. So, in effect, nothing will happen as a result of this ruling other than more appeals
SllX 4y ago
The consequences in theory are political. Theoretically Congress should be impeaching Presidents and expelling members that do not uphold their oaths. Executing consequences into popular Presidents or other members of Congress would also be politicized and have political consequences for Congress, so it doesn’t happen. That said, leaving impeachment or expulsion of legislative members to the Courts would also give them too much power. So the real consequences are at election time. If you ran to retain your seat, and lost, that’s your comeuppance. It’s not granular, but it gets the job done eventually. This is also why control of the White House flips back and forth so much: nothing any President does is particularly popular most of the time, they just have the votes to do it. Incumbents do get massive advantages in staying power but in the present day, two terms looks like about the maximum we would be able to tolerate a President’s political party in the Oval Office and typically after midterms they no longer have the votes in Congress either. Most of this is generally applicable to the States, but I don’t know New York politics specifically but would note that the previous Governor was put into a position where he was pretty much forced to resign both for scandals and for the actions he took while in office; and that was a slow slow build up.

tptacek 4y ago

This is a confusing headline. The judgement here is in NY state court, and pertains to employees of and in the City of New York, which enacted a vaccine requirement for employees of the city and later private employers in the city. Months later, Eric Adams was elected mayor of NYC, and he issued an executive order exempting athletes, performers, and artists from the mandate. Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.

bananapear 4y ago
Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  It doesn't, that's the point. The mandate presumably would have been legal if Adams hadn't added those arbitrary exemptions.
  - busymom0 4y ago
    Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued): > “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.” Source: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=JK5E3gx5XV1/ku37jnWR_PLUS_w==&system=prod&TSPD_101_R0=08533cd43fab2000a714a7fbca6ed5d92c9e780c98ea524c4b9b8701764b487905955c017542ac48080139dd47144800dda62d59b1ba02692121c6b4f86f53b4130e01eca4d9e4b1c8054784ce120d336736ccac0abbaf37b8d4ad9aa7103ddbd641ea04a53032d77d7903f1ad7a1b06abd1dac1cfde96f2 https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

warbler73 4y ago

aaomidi 4y ago

Back pay? Seriously? I thought people weren’t happy about executive power through judicial means, but I’m seeing that same group of people celebrate this. Also note: the NY Supreme Court is actually the lowest court level in NY. Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Courts exist to make people whole. The court decided the executive branch didn't have the right to fire the workers. Because of that, the workers lost their jobs, insurance, and pay. How else would you suggest the court make them whole again?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
The judicial branch is not in the executive or legislative branch. Courts can invalidate laws and regulations from the executive or legislative branches. It is called Checks & Balances. It has kept power distributed for almost 250 years, preventing it from becoming concentrated in any one branch of government. Should that occur, you'd have bad actors enacting a one-party tyrannical state and tens of millions would die, mostly through starvation, but a good many through a state apparatus. It is familiar music. Our civilization has had to deal with such bad actors for a very long time, but despite the lessons of the past, there are still some who desire the one-party state. There is no sign that we, as a species, has completely eliminated the lust for power that's innate in humanity. It is for this reason that the founding fathers hard-coded such things into our nation which act as a stop-gap for tyrants.
prottog 4y ago
> Articles like this are being misleading on purpose. Maybe your complaint should be with the State of New York for having such a misleading name for their lowest-level trial court, and not the OP for literally referring to it by its name ;-)

tb_technical 4y ago

They took people's livelyhoods away, and now they gotta pay.

hammock 4y ago
This idea seems to be exactly the essence of the ruling. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
- tb_technical 4y ago
  People were coping and seething while (not actually) working at their FANG jobs. Later I got voted up from people who got back from (actual) work, who read HN
Maursault 4y ago
They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination. The resistance to vaccination is entirely political. The mandate was not, but instead in the interests of public safety and health. Easing the mandate for special cases was a terrible decision. The decision to ease the mandate should be reversed, not the mandate itself. So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.
- xfitm3 4y ago
  A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics. The mandate should have never existed.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    - gruez 4y ago

hash872 4y ago

I've been thinking a lot about judicial review in common law democracies recently, and I tentatively think a better system would be to vastly expand the number of judges that are involved in making a decision. Example, you'd still have a tiered court system, and your case would still be heard in front of say a 3-9 panel appeals court- but after they write their decisions, a couple hundred other appeals judges at the same level get to a simple cast up or down vote on the decision, remotely. That way the case is decided by a larger, more stable pool of qualified judges- it's not like 1 judge dies, is replaced by the other party, and now that appeals court starts issuing totally partisan decisions the other way on a 5-4 vote. It would hopefully make the judiciary overall less partisan, less of a high-stakes affair to nominate an appeals judge, and less swinging back and forth between 5-4 Democratic or Republican votes

colechristensen 4y ago
I have a feeling this would make things considerably more political. If you don’t like what judges decide, get people elected who will write things clearly into law. If they can’t do that, it sucks, go fix the political situation and stop trying to fix that dysfunction by making major systematic changes.
- hash872 4y ago
  >get people elected who will write things clearly into law You can pass whatever law you'd like now- the existing judiciary can simply decide that it doesn't apply or isn't 'constitutional', and their decisions aren't reviewable. It's awarding ultimate power in society to a very small group The vast majority of developed countries don't work this way, at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty At a minimum, calling a law 'unconstitutional' should require a supermajority out of a fairly large body
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
I think you're just describing court packing because maybe you disagree with the outcome based on your partisan politics?

pseudolus 4y ago

FYI, the case was decided in Richmond County a/k/a Staten Island, arguably NYC's most conservative borough. The judge, a Republican, was elected in 2018. [0]. [0] https://ballotpedia.org/Ralph_Porzio https://ballotpedia.org/Ralph_Porzio

lettergram 4y ago

Fun fact NY Supreme Court is actually a lower level court in New York. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court So this will likely be challenged

Aunche 4y ago

I can understand why the vaccine mandate would be unconstitutional as a whole, but why shouldn't the city be allowed to fire whoever they feel like firing? New York is an at will state.

ls15 4y ago
- triceratops 4y ago
  I don't think you understand what "at will" means.
  - ls15 4y ago
    Where is that in the statement that I quoted?
rasz 4y ago
bufferoverflow 4y ago
"At will" doesn't mean you can fire for any reason. Even if you don't state the reason (which they did), it would be illegal to fire all black people from a company, because it's trivial to prove for a large enough company. "at will" doesn't supercede civil rights act and other laws.
- Aunche 4y ago
  This is bad faith interpretation of my comment. We all know what the Civil Rights Act is. My question is what rule exactly is NYC breaking?
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    thats exactly what the court ruling explains

VagueMag 4y ago

1MachineElf 4y ago

Now how will we force people to do unpopular things without the ability to deprive them of their livelihood?

georgeplusplus 4y ago

What was wild is the amount of hate and vitriol directed towards those who chose not get to vaccinated and lost or risked losing their jobs. This forum was not exempt from that hate. I hope this court opinion is enough to sway the opinion of those who held such extreme beliefs in this vaccine mandate that there are different opinions, and it doesnt have to be so extreme when deciding how to move forward with things that affect peoples livelihoods. Sometimes you do what is best for you and I do what is best for me is a perfectly logical and sane reasoning.

eganist 4y ago
There wasn't hate, at least not broadly. There was anger, sure, but not hate. At the time the focus was on making sure the vaccinations were taken seriously so as to protect those who couldn't do it, and plenty of people instead made ideological and self-centered decisions (their right to do so) rather than compassionate and ethical ones.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mandmandam 4y ago
  There wasn't broad levels of hate? Da fuq? People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels. People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all. Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
  - eganist 4y ago
    > There wasn't broad levels of hate? > Da fuq? > People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels. > People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all. > Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it. Right, that sounds like what I said earlier, mandmandam: "There was anger, sure, but not hate" - and you affirmed it; white-hot anger. And it was deserved. But broad hate, no. We just wanted people to be responsible. When you violate the social contract (protecting others by doing what's due), you attract anger. I'm not really here to debate it; anyone saying otherwise is spinning our anger for others' irresponsibility and others' putting the immunocompromised in danger.

fuckyah 4y ago

paulwilsondev 4y ago

another win for the anti-vaxxers

olliej 4y ago

Does that mean NY employees who don't want covid can stop working and still be paid?