New York City’s controversial soda ban was supposed to go into effect March 12 — that’s tomorrow — but the thirsty citizens of Gotham got a last-minute stay of Pepsicution with a judge’s ruling that prevents the order from going into effect.
The NYC soda ban was put in motion by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who felt it was a step toward combating obesity.
But the rest of America and much of New York saw the move as paternalistic, ineffective, over-reaching, silly, a waste of time, and just generally stupid.
It seems a judge agrees on the NYC soda ban criticism because New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling ruled today that the ban won’t go into effect for a number of reasons.
The NYC soda ban was overturned just this afternoon, and scant details have come out regarding the specifics of the banned ban. But the Wall Street Journal reports that Judge Tingling decided Monday NYC is “enjoined and permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations.”
According to the paper, the NYC soda ban was “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences,” a criticism not terribly unlike previous ones lobbed at Bloomberg wholesale.
(One Twitter account that solely tweets episodes of Seinfeld reacted to the NYC soda ban ruling, below.)
Kramer and Jackie Chiles’ case against the NYC soda ban gets the law overturned. Kramer thinks Bloomberg is having him followed.
— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) March 11, 2013
Tingling further wrote that “simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole … the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule.”
Judge Tingling heavily criticized the NYC soda ban’s legal standing from a standpoint of the authority of the NYC Board Of Health, noting the failed rules contained loopholes so large as to “defeat and/or serve to gut the purpose the rule.”
Tingling also said allowing the NYC soda ban to go through would “would leave [the NYC Board of Health’s] authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination … create an administrative Leviathan.”
Do you agree the NYC soda ban was a bossy limit on your personal soft drink freedoms? Or should city health boards be able to legislate away dangerous behaviors?