Court Opinion

ID: 9548861
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:09:51.62308+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:19:31.337710
License: Public Domain

DOOLING, J.
I dissent. It has always been the law in this state, until this decision, that where the Legislature has prohibited certain conduct the cities and counties under the express grant of power contained in the California Constitution, section 11, article XI, could prohibit other and different conduct in the same field by local ordinance. The cases in support of this rule are collected in the dissenting opinion heretofore filed in this case (Cal.) 18 Cal.Rptr. 33, 35, 367 P.2d 673, 675, and need not be repeated here.
• I concede that as to statutes requiring affirmative action, i.e., registration, the filing of claims, the obtaining of licenses, etc., the requirements .for such affirmative action provided by state statute may be well intended to be exclusive of additional requirements and in effect may amount to an implied legislative determination that if such affirmative requirements are met, nothing more of affirmative action can be required. The hiatus in the reasoning of the majority in this case is found in the attempt to transfer this concept to purely pro*113hibitory legislation. It is one thing to say that where the Legislature imposes the requirement of doing something affirmative upon a citizen, it may be implied that the Legislature intended that the cities and counties shall not require him to do more. It is quite another thing to say that where the Legislature prohibits his doing something it shall be implied that the Legislature intended that the cities and counties should not add additional prohibitions.
The distinction may well be illustrated by a licensing statute such as that involved in Agnew v. City of Los Angeles, 51 Cal.2d 1 [330 P.2d 385]. Where the state requires certain steps to be taken to procure a license to engage in a particular business, those steps are taken and the license issued, the right of the licensee to engage in the licensed business is affirmatively granted to him by the state and the implication that no further requirements should be imposed upon him may be naturally drawn. But where the Legislature prohibits certain sexual relations between unmarried persons, are we equally to infer an intention of the Legislature that the right of unmarried persons to engage in any other sort of sexual relations not expressly forbidden by the Legislature has been impliedly granted to them ? To so hold is in effect to say that because the Legislature has not forbidden fornication, it has licensed it. I cannot bring myself to the point of agreeing that we may imply from the Legislature’s failure to prohibit fornication an intention to make it legal.
Section 11, article XI was placed in the Constitution by the people of the state. If the changes which the state has undergone make it unwise to continue in force the power granted by that section to the cities and counties to enact legislation- not in conflict with general laws, the people can repeal it. Until they do so its grant of power remains, what it has always been, “just as broad, sweeping and inclusive as the powers with relation thereto which are vested in the legislature itself, except that they must not conflict with the Constitution or with general laws, and must be confined in their application only to the city or county adopting them.” (Stanislaus County etc. Assn. v. County of Stanislaus, 8 Cal.2d 378, 384 [65 P.2d 1305].)
White, J., concurred.