Board of Com'rs of City of Mobile v. Orr
Decision Date | 10 April 1913 |
Citation | 181 Ala. 308,61 So. 920 |
Court | Alabama Supreme Court |
Parties | BOARD OF COM'RS OF CITY OF MOBILE et al. v. ORR. |
Appeal from Chancery Court, Mobile County; Thomas H. Smith Chancellor.
Bill by Wade H. Orr against the Board of Commissioners of the City of Mobile and the City Health Officers to enjoin the enforcement of an ordinance requiring the paving of certain stables and connection thereof with the city sewerage system, and to declare the ordinance invalid as unreasonable. From a decree granting a preliminary injunction, respondents appeal. Affirmed.
The bill alleges that the complaint comes within the purview of a certain ordinance adopted by the board of commissioners of the city of Mobile to become effective after January 1, 1913. It is alleged that the complainant would have to spend several hundred dollars in order to lay the cement floor required by the ordinance and would have to procure the quarters for his stock while the floor was being laid and while it was hardening. It is further alleged that the ordinance is unconstitutional and unreasonable: First. Because it is limited to persons who keep more than one animal, requiring the man who keeps more than one to lay a floor according to specifications, while he who keeps only one animal is not required to do so, although, in fact, there is no sanitary distinction which would justify such a classification, and, on the contrary, the aggregate number of horses, mules, and cows which are kept in the city of Mobile by persons who own only one animal largely exceeds the aggregate number of horses, mules, and cows which are kept in the city of Mobile by persons keeping two or more animals. Second. That the ordinance is unreasonable because of the expense required to comply with it, and because the mineral floors, uncovered by wood, would be seriously injurious to the animals kept therein, and for other reasons not necessary to here state. Other matters are set up as rendering the ordinance unreasonable and void, but they sufficiently appear from the opinion. The ordinance is as follows:
Section 4, as above quoted, is an amendment of section 4 as formerly adopted, and the ordinance was further amended by the following:
B. Boykin Boone, of Mobile, for appellants.
Gregory L. & H.T. Smith, of Mobile, for appellee.
The statutes of the state, with which the quasi legislative acts of inferior municipal bodies must be classed so far as concerns the constitutional requirement of equal laws, are not to be put aside by judicial decree, except upon satisfactory assurance that they do offend against the principle of equality. Classification, or discrimination between classes, is allowed if founded upon distinctions reasonable in principle and having just relation to the object sought to be accomplished. The courts concede a wide discretion to the legislative authority in respect of the grounds of classification, and must be reluctant to disturb even a municipal ordinance enacted in pursuance of a comprehensive grant of power, and designed presumably to promote the public health and comfort, but the power to condemn is more freely exercised in such cases, for, as to municipal ordinances, it was an ancient jurisdiction of judicial tribunals to pronounce upon their reasonableness and consequent validity. It was always the doctrine of the courts that every ordinance or by-law must be reasonable and not inconsistent with the general principles of the law of the land, particularly those having relation to the liberty of the citizen and the rights of private property. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 371, 6 Sup.Ct....
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...if based on some difference which bears a reasonable and just relation to the attempted classification. Board of Com'rs of City of Mobile v. Orr, 181 Ala. 308, 61 So. 920 (1913). We do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the legislature, faced with enacting the death penalty laws for ......
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