# City of Chicago v. Morales > Supreme Court of the United States · June 10, 1999 · 527 U.S. 41 URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433823 ## Case - **Full name:** CITY OF CHICAGO v. MORALES Et Al. - **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States - **Decided:** June 10, 1999 - **Citations:** 527 U.S. 41; 119 S. Ct. 1849; 144 L. Ed. 2d 67; 1999 U.S. LEXIS 4005 - **Precedential status:** Published - **Opinion:** Concurrence by Kennedy - **Judges:** Stevens, O'Con-Nor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, O'Connor, Scaua, Thomas, Rehnquist, Scalia - **Cited by:** 1,265 later opinions in the Frix Law Library ## Citator (automated) - No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases. - Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433823 ## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction) - holding that an anti-loitering ordinance that made it unlawful “to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” was unconstitutionally vague and explaining that “[i]t is difficult to imagine how any citizen of the city of Chicago standing in a public place with a group of… - holding that a provision which criminalized loitering, defined as “to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose,” was “inherently subjective because its application depends on whether some purpose is ‘apparent’ to the officer on the scene,” and declaring that it was voi… - holding unconstitutionally vague an anti-loitering ordinance, which defined loitering as remaining in place with "no apparent purpose," finding that standard "inherently subjective because its application depends on whether some purpose is `apparent' to the officer on the scene." - concluding that an ordinance “does not provide sufficiently specific limits on the enforcement discretion of the police to meet constitutional standards” because its application was “inherently subjective” - stating that Chicago loitering ordinance’s “impact on the social contact between gang members and others does not impair the First Amendment ‘right of association’ that our cases have recognized” (internal citation omitted) ## Opinion text Justice Kennedy, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. I join Parts I, II, and V of the Court’s opinion and concur in the judgment. I also share many of the concerns Justice Stevens expresses in Part IV with respect to the sufficiency of notice under the ordinance. As interpreted by the Illinois Supreme Court, the Chicago ordinance would reach a broad range of innocent conduct. For this reason it is not necessarily saved by the requirement that the citizen must disobey a police order to disperse before there is a violation. We have not often examined these types of orders. Cf. Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, 382 U. S. 87 (1965). It can be assumed, however, that some police commands will subject a citizen to prosecution for disobeying whether or not the citizen knows why the order is given. Illustrative examples include when the police tell a pedestrian not to enter a building and the reason is to avoid impeding a rescue team, or to protect a crime scene, or to secure an area for the protection of a public official. It does not follow, however, that any unexplained police order must be obeyed without notice of the lawfulness of the order. The predicate of an order to disperse is not, in my view, sufficient to eliminate doubts regarding the adequacy of notice under this ordinance. A citizen, while engaging in a wide array of innocent conduct, is not likely to know when he may be subject to a dispersal order based on the officer’s own knowledge of the identity or affiliations of other persons with whom the citizen is con *70 gregating; nor may the citizen be able to assess what an officer might conceive to be the citizen’s lack of an apparent purpose. --- Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9433823. Public record. Not legal advice.