Foley v. Connelie

The Supreme Court's majority decision upheld the tacit notion contained in the New York State statute that the position of aliens was different than the position of citizens. However, with that decision, the Court was careful to stipulate that their ruling in no way was intended to encourage exclusion of aliens from practicing their professions. Their only intent was to make clear that only citizens were allowed to be a member of police forces. Moreover, the Court's decision gave New York, hence all states, the freedom to exclude aliens from participating in official state occupations and/or institutions.

An issue that the dissenting opinion embraced, but was largely avoided by the majority decision, was the precedent set in the Sugarman case. (Even Justice Stewart, who ultimately concurred with the majority decision, expressed doubt about the validity of some of the Court's former decisions.) Minority justices held that the Court's decision only took cursory and superficial account of previous legal interpretations and stipulations forwarded by the Court's decision in the Sugarman case. While Sugarman specifically delineated between work that involved "policymaking decisions" and positions that merely entailed the execution of policy and despite Marshall's assertion that police duties involved application rather than determination of public policy, the majority decision prevailed.

In determining that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was not violated by a state's citizenship requirement for police officers, the majority opinion held that states must merely show a relationship between their exclusionary policy and a state's interest in that policy. While application of that policy must be examined to determine if a given state position warrants exclusion of aliens, the Court steadfastly maintained that the state police, by virtue of "an almost infinite variety of discretionary powers," justified a state's insistence that police officers also be U.S. citizens. Thus, while being careful to strictly address the exclusion of aliens from the police force, the Court did not address similarly discretionary discrimination in other professions that might be licensed by states. Thus, during the latter decades of the twentieth century amidst a climate of increasing public questioning of constitutional limits on the rights of immigrants, immigrant and alien rights were specifically limited only with regard to positions which touched on making public policy.