Bingo. Judge is right, but for the wrong reason.
I don’t know which is worse, the totalitarian thinking of Bloomberg, or the totalitarian thinking of the judge who condemns it because it might be inconsistently applied in a city block....
Actually, the Judge issued an excellent opinion, which ought to be sustained in the event Bloomberg appeals. In administrative law, a court is supposed to defer to the judgment of an “expert” administrative agency, which is a presumption built into the law. In both federal and state administrative law, a judge basically has to let an administrative regulation stand unless he or she finds that the regulation is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to established statutory or case law.
So, therefore, the judge could not throw the regulation out based on its own merits—he had to look at it through the prism of the prevaling administrative procedure law. This is a typical analysis in all administrative appeals. If you attack the agency regulation or ruling head-on, you lose, because the court is going to defer to the “expertise” of the agency.
I’m guessing you haven’t read the opinion. Even the reporter wrote that the judge also said it’s a legislative power not an executive power. Unless you’ve read the actual opinion you have no idea what the judge understood or didn’t understand.