Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-123_g3bi.pdf
Page Number: 101

2 

FULTON v. PHILADELPHIA 

GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment 

scrutiny,  the  majority  must  carry  the  burden  of  showing
that the policy isn’t “generally applicable.” 

* 
That path turns out to be a long and lonely one.  The dis-
trict court held that the City’s public accommodations law 
(its Fair Practices Ordinance or FPO) is both generally ap-
plicable and applicable to CSS.  At least initially, the ma-
jority chooses to bypass the district court’s major premise—
that  the  FPO  qualifies  as  “generally  applicable”  under 
Smith.  It’s a curious choice given that the FPO applies only
to certain defined entities that qualify as public accommo-
dations while the “generally applicable law” in Smith was 
“an  across-the-board  criminal  prohibition”  enforceable
against anyone.  494 U. S., at 884.  But if the goal is to turn
a big dispute of constitutional law into a small one, the ma-
jority’s choice to focus its attack on the district court’s minor 
premise—that the FPO applies to CSS as a matter of mu-
nicipal law—begins to make some sense.  Still, it isn’t ex-
actly an obvious path.  The Third Circuit did not address 
the district court’s interpretation of the FPO.  And not one 
of the over 80 briefs before us contests it.  To get to where
it wishes to go, then, the majority must go it alone.  So much 
for the adversarial process and being “a court of review, not 
of first view.”  Brownback v. King, 592 U. S. ___, ___, n. 4 
(2021) (slip op., at 5, n. 4) (internal quotation marks omit-
ted).

Trailblazing through the Philadelphia city code turns out
to be no walk in the park either.  As the district court ob-
served, the City’s FPO defines “public accommodations” ex-
pansively to include “[a]ny provider” that “solicits or accepts 
patronage”  of  “the  public  or  whose  . . .  services  [or]  facili-
ties”  are  “made  available  to  the  public.”    App.  to  Pet.  for
Cert. 77a (alteration omitted; emphasis deleted).  And, the 
district  court  held,  this  definition  covers  CSS  because 
(among other things) it “publicly solicits prospective foster