Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County v. Bill Lee, Governor

11/02/2026 IN THE SUPREME COURT OF TENNESSEE AT NASHVILLE February 12, 2026 Session METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT OF NASHVILLE AND DAVIDSON COUNTY v. BILL LEE, GOVERNOR, ET AL. Appeal by Permission from the Chancery Court for Davidson County No. 23-0778-II Anne C. Martin, Chancellor; Mark L. Hayes, Judge; and Zachary R. Walden, Judge ___________________________________ No. M2023-01678-SC-R11-CV ___________________________________ In 2023, the General Assembly enacted a law requiring various changes to the board of commissioners of an airport authority “in a county having a metropolitan form of government with a population of more than [500,000].” Act of April 21, 2023, ch. 488, 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts 1676, 1676 (codified at Tenn. Code. Ann. § 42-4-105(d)(1) (2007 & Supp. 2023). The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County challenged the law, alleging that it violates the Local Legislation Clause and Anti-Ripper Clause of article XI, section 9, of the Tennessee Constitution. The trial court held that the law violates both provisions. The Court of Appeals agreed as to the Local Legislation Clause, without reaching the Anti-Ripper Clause. Metro. Gov’t of Nash. & Davidson Cnty. v. Lee, No. M2023-01678-COA-R3-CV, 2025 WL 1218089, at *19 (Tenn. Ct. App. Apr. 28, 2025), perm. app. granted, No. M2023-01678-SC-R11-CV, 2025 WL 2692124 (Tenn. Sep. 18, 2025). We granted review. But after the case was fully briefed and argued, the General Assembly amended the parts of the law that were challenged. We hold that these recent legislative amendments render the claims in this case moot. We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals’ judgment and the trial court’s final order and remand the case to the trial court with instructions to dismiss the case as moot. Tenn. R. App. P. 11 Appeal by Permission; Judgment of the Court of Appeals Vacated; Remanded to the Chancery Court for Davidson County SARAH K. CAMPBELL, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which JEFFREY S. BIVINS, C.J., and HOLLY KIRBY, DWIGHT E. TARWATER, and MARY L. WAGNER, JJ., joined. Jonathan Skrmetti, Attorney General and Reporter; J. Matthew Rice, Solicitor General; Madeline W. Clark, Principal Deputy Solicitor General; Matthew D. Cloutier and Joshua Daniel Minchin, Assistant Solicitors General; and Walker Anderson and Thomas C. Archibald, Honors Fellows, for the appellants, Bill Lee, Governor of the State of Tennessee; Randy McNally, Speaker of the Senate of the State of Tennessee; and Cameron Sexton, Speaker of the House of Representatives of the State of Tennessee. Wallace W. Dietz, Melissa Roberge, Michael R. Dohn, Robert E. Cooper, Jr., and Wesley S. Love, Nashville, Tennessee, for the appellee, Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. OPINION I. The Metropolitan Airport Authority Act (“the Act”), enacted in 1969, allows an eligible municipality to create a metropolitan airport authority governed by a board of commissioners. Act of April 28, 1969, ch. 174, 1969 Tenn. Pub. Acts 482 (codified as amended at Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 42-4-101 through -117). Relying on this statutory authority, the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County (“Metro Nashville”) created the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority (“MNAA”) in 1970. In 2023, the General Assembly amended the Act by passing Senate Bill 1326 (“S.B. 1326”). Act of April 21, 2023, ch. 488, 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts 1676. That legislation modified Tennessee Code Annotated section 42-4-105, which governs the appointment of the boards of commissioners for metropolitan airport authorities. Among other things, section two of S.B. 1326 vacated and reconstituted “[t]he board of commissioners of the authority in a county having a metropolitan form of government with a population of more than [500,000];” reduced the size of the board from ten members to eight; and vested the appointment authority for six of those eight members in the Governor, the Speaker of the House, and the Speaker of the Senate. Compare id. § 2(1)(A), with Tenn. Code Ann. § 42- 4-105 (2007). There is no dispute that the amendments affected only the MNAA board of commissioners and not the board for any other existing metropolitan airport authority in the State. On June 12, 2023, Metro Nashville filed this action for declaratory and injunctive relief against Governor Bill Lee, Speaker of the Senate Randy McNally, and Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton. The complaint alleged that S.B. 1326 violates three provisions of the Tennessee Constitution: the Law of the Land Clause of article I, section 8, and the Local Legislation and Anti-Ripper Clauses of article XI, section 9. The case was assigned to a three-judge panel pursuant to Tennessee Code Annotated section 20-18-101 and Tennessee Supreme Court Rule 54. Both sides filed motions for summary judgment. The panel issued a final order on October 31, 2023, holding that section two of S.B. 1326 violated all three constitutional provisions and that sections six, seven, eight, and nine violated the Law of the Land Clause. -2- The panel enjoined the state defendants from enforcing the offending sections and elided those sections in their entirety. The state defendants appealed. The Court of Appeals affirmed in part and reversed in part. Metro. Gov’t of Nash. & Davidson Cnty. v. Lee, 2025 WL 1218089, at *19. It reversed the trial court’s rulings regarding the Law of the Land Clause. Id. But it affirmed the trial court’s holding that section two violated the Local Legislation Clause and its decision to elide that section in full. Id. at *14. The court did not reach the Anti-Ripper Clause, finding that issue “pretermitted.” Id. This Court granted review. Order, Metro. Gov’t of Nashville & Davidson Cnty. v. Lee, No. M2023-01678-SC-R11-CV, 2025 WL 2692124 (Tenn. Sep. 18, 2025). The Court asked the parties to address (1) whether section two violated the Local Legislation Clause, (2) whether section two violated the Anti-Ripper Clause, and (3) whether subsection 2(1)(C) could be elided. Id. After the case was fully briefed and argued, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 2473 (“S.B. 2473”). Act of April 23, 2026, ch. 978, 2026 Tenn. Pub. Acts ----. S.B. 2473 amended Tennessee Code Annotated section 42-4-105 by deleting that section— including the subsections at issue in this appeal—and replacing it with new statutory language. Id. § 1. Unlike S.B. 1326, which applied only to metropolitan airport authorities in counties with a population exceeding 500,000, the new law applies to all metropolitan airport authorities as well as some regional airport authorities. See Act of April 23, 2026, ch. 978, §§ 1–2, 2026 Tenn. Pub. Acts ----. This Court ordered the parties to provide supplemental briefing regarding whether a justiciable controversy still exists in this appeal. Order, Metro. Gov’t of Nashville & Davidson Cnty. v. Lee, No. M2023-01678-SC-R11-CV (Tenn. June 9, 2026). The state defendants contend that S.B. 2473 moots this case and ask this Court to vacate the lower court’s decision and remand with instructions to dismiss. Metro Nashville disagrees. In its view, this case is not moot “because the Court can still provide judicial relief to the prevailing party.” II. Our analysis in this case begins and ends with mootness. Mootness is one of several doctrines that help a court determine whether a case is justiciable. See, e.g., State v. Sokolosky, 721 S.W.3d 215, 218 (Tenn. 2025) (“Mootness is a component consideration of justiciability.”). A case is justiciable when it presents a real rather than theoretical question and when a “legally protectable interest [is] at stake.” Id. (quoting State v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 18 S.W.3d 186, 193 (Tenn. 2000)). A case must remain justiciable “from the time it is filed until the moment of final appellate disposition.” Norma Faye Pyles Lynch Fam. Purpose LLC v. Putnam Cnty., 301 S.W.3d 196, 203–04 (Tenn. -3- 2009). A case becomes moot—and is no longer justiciable—when “an event occurring after the commencement of the case extinguishes the legal controversy attached to the issue” or “otherwise prevents the prevailing party from receiving meaningful relief in the event of a favorable judgment.” City of Memphis v. Hargett, 414 S.W.3d 88, 96 (Tenn. 2013). The general rule is that a moot case should be dismissed. Sokolosky, 721 S.W.3d at 218. When a challenged law is repealed, “the case will ordinarily be dismissed as moot because it is no longer possible for the court to grant any effectual relief.” Shaw v. Metro. Gov’t of Nash. & Davidson Cnty., 651 S.W.3d 907, 916–17 (Tenn. 2022). When, however, “the challenged law is amended or is repealed and replaced with a new law,” the analysis is more nuanced. Id. at 917. An “insignificant” alteration will not moot the challenge. Id. But if the law “is changed so as to clearly cure the alleged defect or in such a way that it no longer applies to the plaintiff, plainly there remains no live controversy for the court to decide.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, Metro Nashville has not argued that S.B. 2473 failed to “clearly cure the alleged defect” in the challenged statutory provision. Rather, all parties seem to agree that the specific legal controversy that is the subject of this appeal—whether certain provisions of S.B. 1326 violated the Local Legislation Clause or Anti-Ripper Clause—has been extinguished. Yet Metro Nashville urges us to decide this appeal anyway. According to Metro Nashville, this appeal implicates the voluntary cessation doctrine. We have identified a defendant’s voluntary cessation of challenged conduct as one of four situations that may “provide a basis for not invoking the mootness doctrine.” Sokolosky, 721 S.W.3d at 218. “[A] defendant’s decision to voluntarily cease engaging in the challenged conduct generally will not moot a case” unless “it is ‘absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful conduct cannot be reasonably expected to recur.’” Shaw, 651 S.W.3d at 912 (quoting Norma Faye, 301 S.W.3d at 205).1 The reason voluntary cessation does not necessarily moot a claim is that the defendant may, upon the claim’s dismissal, resume the allegedly wrongful conduct. Id. (explaining that “courts are wary of ‘permitting a litigant to cease its wrongful conduct temporarily to frustrate judicial review and then be free to resume the 1 In Shaw, the parties briefed whether this Court should adopt a different standard for “voluntary cessation by a governmental entity”—namely, the standard adopted by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Speech First, Inc. v. Schlissel, 939 F.3d 756, 768 (6th Cir. 2019). 651 S.W.3d at 913. Under that standard, when a “government voluntarily ceases its actions by enacting new legislation or repealing the challenged legislation, that change will presumptively moot the case unless there are clear contraindications that the change is not genuine.” Speech First, 939 F.3d at 768. But given our “ultimate disposition of the case” in Shaw, we did not address that issue. 651 S.W.3d at 913 n.6. We see no need to address that issue here either given our holding that the challenged law cannot be reasonably expected to recur. -4- same conduct after the case is dismissed as moot’” (quoting Norma Faye, 301 S.W.3d at 205)). If there is a reasonable possibility that the defendant will resume the allegedly wrongful conduct, then the case is not moot because the plaintiff still has a concrete interest in having the conduct enjoined or declared unlawful. That is, the case still serves as a vehicle for “providing some type of judicial relief to the prevailing party.” Id.2 Metro Nashville points out that the General Assembly amended the challenged law in this case “after three years of litigation” when facing “an imminent decision from this Court.” And it predicts that the legislature will pass “new statutes that are local in effect through multiple, layered criteria” given its “pattern of targeting one local government in the same way.” As evidence, Metro Nashville points to a separate lawsuit it filed in 2023 challenging a law that modified the appointment process for the board of directors of a metropolitan government’s sports authority. See Act of April 21, 2023, ch. 410, 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts 1270. According to Metro Nashville, the challenged law similarly used “multilayered criteria” to ensure that it would apply “only to Metro Nashville.” That lawsuit is currently stayed pending the outcome of this appeal. Metro Nashville urges that resolving this case on the merits, rather than “delay[ing] the inevitable,” would still provide Metro Nashville with a measure of judicial relief. We are not persuaded. The specific conduct challenged in this action is the General Assembly’s enactment of a law regulating the composition of and appointment process for airport authority boards of directors and the enforcement of that law by the state defendants, the officials newly tasked with appointing board members. See Act of April 21, 2023, ch. 488, § 2(1)(A), 2023 Tenn. Pub. Acts 1676, 1676. But that law is repealed. And Metro Nashville has offered no evidence to suggest that the General Assembly is likely to amend this statute to reenact the challenged provisions of S.B. 1326. Unless those provisions are reenacted, there is no danger of enforcement by the state defendants. Instead, Metro Nashville hangs its hat on a pending lawsuit involving a different law that regulates a different entity. But the mere fact that the other law purportedly suffers from the same alleged constitutional defect as the law here does not warrant application of the voluntary cessation doctrine. As explained above, the voluntary cessation doctrine rests on the notion that, unless it is clear that the challenged conduct will not recur, there remains a risk of future harm that gives the plaintiff an ongoing stake in the legal controversy. The focus of the voluntary cessation doctrine, then, must be on the likelihood of the specific conduct challenged in the case recurring—not whether the legislature may enact an entirely different law that 2 Although we have sometimes described the voluntary cessation doctrine as an “exception” to mootness, it is better understood as a circumstance that “prevents finding mootness in the first place.” Sokolosky, 721 S.W.3d at 219. The risk that the challenged conduct will recur is a “future harm” that “grants the plaintiff a continued right to litigate.” Tyler B. Lindley, The Constitutional Model of Mootness, 48 BYU L. Rev. 2151, 2181 (2023) (explaining that the harm giving rise to a justiciable controversy “shifts from a harm that is currently being suffered to one that will be suffered in the future”). -5- happens to suffer from the same alleged legal defect. This ensures that adjudication of the case at hand will actually provide the plaintiff with judicial relief. Here, adjudication of Metro Nashville’s claims in this case would not provide Metro Nashville with meaningful judicial relief. The operative complaint seeks (1) a declaration that the now-repealed statutory provisions are unconstitutional, and (2) an injunction barring the implementation of those repealed provisions. But a declaration regarding the constitutionality of statutory provisions that are no longer the law of the land would be of no help. See Hooker v. Haslam, 437 S.W.3d 409, 417 (Tenn. 2014) (explaining that the repeal of a statute “render[s] [a] case moot, since the challenged statute [is] no longer the law of the land”); Tenn. Negro Funeral Dirs. Ass’n v. Bd. of Funeral Dirs. & Embalmers of Tenn., 332 S.W.2d 195, 197 (Tenn. 1960) (“The long and well established rule in this State is that the Court ‘will not decide a moot question, though it be the question of the constitutionality of a statute.’” (quoting State ex rel. West v. Kivett, 308 S.W.2d 833, 837 (Tenn. 1957))). Nor would an injunction barring the implementation of statutory provisions that do not exist. See Shaw, 651 S.W.3d at 916–17 (“Where a lawsuit challenges a statute or ordinance and seeks only prospective relief, and the statute or ordinance is simply repealed, the case will ordinarily be dismissed as moot because it is no longer possible for the court to grant any effectual relief.”). And because the legislature cannot reasonably be expected to reenact the specific provisions at issue in this case, the requested declaratory and injunctive relief would not remedy any future harm either. To the extent Metro Nashville seeks an opinion in this case so that it can use that opinion to help resolve challenges to similar statutes, we are unable to grant that relief. That is because “the province of a court is to decide, not advise, and to settle rights, not to give abstract opinions.” Sokolosky, 712 S.W.3d at 218 (quoting State v. Wilson, 70 Tenn. 204, 210 (1879)). The voluntary cessation doctrine is not a license to issue impermissible advisory opinions. If Metro Nashville wishes to litigate the constitutionality of the sports authority law, it may do that in the lawsuit it has already filed to challenge that distinct law. In sum, we conclude that this case is moot because the legislature’s amendments repealed the provisions that allegedly violated the Local Legislation Clause and Anti- Ripper Clause, thereby curing the alleged legal defect in the law. And the voluntary cessation doctrine does not apply because it cannot reasonably be expected that the challenged conduct will recur. When a case becomes moot on appeal, we ordinarily “vacate the judgments below with directions to dismiss the case.” Locke v. Aston, 705 S.W.3d 147, 149 (Tenn. 2024). “That procedure clears the path for future relitigation of the issues between the parties and eliminates a judgment, review of which was prevented through happenstance.” United States v. Munsingwear, Inc., 340 U.S. 36, 40 (1950). Although vacatur is “not automatic,” Locke, 705 S.W.3d at 149, we see no reason to depart from that general rule here. We -6- therefore vacate the decisions below and instruct the trial court to dismiss the case as moot on remand. CONCLUSION For the reasons explained, this case is moot. We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals’ judgment and the trial court’s final order. And we remand this case to the trial court for entry of an order dismissing the case as moot. The costs of this appeal are taxed to the state defendants. _____________________________ SARAH K. CAMPBELL, JUSTICE -7-