Appeals Panel: Suit Challenging COVID Orders Moot

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 12/26/2025) A Michigan Court of Appeals panel held this week that an Otsego County barbecue restaurant’s lawsuit challenging the local health department’s pandemic-related orders is moot.

Judge Brock Swartzle concurred in the Dec. 22 judgment, but he would have addressed Moore Murphy Hospitality’s claims challenging the constitutionality of the provision which authorized local health departments to issue orders regarding an “imminent danger” to public health.

“… Because any decision by this panel on the merits of those claims would be summarily vacated by our Supreme Court, per its order in T & V Assoc. v. Director of Health & Human Services … there is little to be gained by this panel reaching the merits,” he noted. “But make no mistake, this is an unjust state of affairs.”

In T & V, the high court dismissed a catering company’s lawsuit challenging the state health director’s now defunct pandemic orders limiting restaurant operations to 50 percent occupancy and closing at 10 p.m., holding the issue was moot since the health orders were rescinded.

Swartzle believes the constitutionality of the relevant statute “was unquestionably a matter of public significance” and he took issue with the Supreme Court majority’s decision not to consider the merits of the claims because the emergency had ended, and because a similar order was unlikely.

Swartzle said individuals and businesses are “expected to follow the law and government emergencies” during a COVID-like pandemic, but if they challenge a law’s constitutionality when that emergency ends, the courts have said it’s moot, and that is a breach of society’s social contract.

“There will be more public-health emergencies in the future, as sure as the thunder follows the lightning,” he wrote. “We live in increasingly global, interconnected societies, with emerging biohazards and technologies for which we have few effective guardrails. …

“I am not as sanguine as the Supreme Court majority in  T & V Assoc. that – at the moment – there is nothing to see here,” Swartzle added.