Lockyer v. City and County of San Francisco

I concur. The majority opinion addresses primarily the limitations on the power of local officials to disobey statutes that may be, but have not yet been judicially established to be, unconstitutional. I write separately to focus on the related but distinct question of what courts should do when confronted with such disobedience on the part of local officials. As the majority opinion suggests, a court should not invariably refuse to decide constitutional questions arising from local governments’ or local officials’ refusal to obey purportedly unconstitutional statutes. Indeed, California…