The COVID Project
The record
- Jurisdiction
- Tennessee
- Level
- State
- Authority
- Tenn. Code Ann. sec. 8-6-109; construing Tenn. Code Ann. sec. 58-2-107, Executive Order No. 54 and Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)
- Issued
- 2020-07-16 July 16, 2020
- Effective
- July 2020 (opinion) (read as 2020-07-16)
- End
- n/a (opinion) (read as 2021-09-30)
- In force
- July 16, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021
- Quarters
- 2020 Q32020 Q42021 Q12021 Q22021 Q3
2020 Q22020 Q32020 Q42021 Q12021 Q22021 Q3
- Limitation types
- Face-covering requirementStanding duty
- Addressees
- persons generally; businesses within counties and metropolitan areas under face-covering orders
- Character
- agency interpretation
- Collection
- Standing duties: Tennessee DUT-TN
Operative words
As a general proposition, a governmental mandate that requires the general population to wear face coverings in public due to the health emergency caused by COVID-19 would be constitutionally defensible. The constitutionality of any particular governmental mandate, though, would depend on its specific terms and the underlying authority of the governmental entity issuing it.
Penalty
The county orders under EO 54 were orders 'for purposes of Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 58-2-120' (Ex. TN-031, Section C, para. 6; Ex. DUT-TN-007)
What it required
Confirmed that the county face-covering mandates issued under Executive Order No. 54's delegation (Exs. TN-021, TN-069 to TN-075, TN-083) and the metropolitan health departments' mandates (Exs. MET-BNA-005, -009, -034, -062) were lawful exercises of the police power; applied Jacobson ('a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members') and The Local Spot v. Lee (Ex. DUT-TN-018), and stated that 'the governmental decision as to how best to protect the public is afforded great deference.' Character as recorded: agency_interpretation (Attorney General opinion).
Retrieval noteOfficial PDF from the Attorney General's site (643,472 bytes). The letterhead date is in the image layer and the Attorney General's index page carries no dates; the month is fixed by the opinion's own references. The Analysis text layer is doubled-character; the Question and Opinion sections extract cleanly.