Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — I’m the wrong person to be neutral here, because the case that made this national was about my industry.

Nevada capped worship attendance at fifty people. Not fifty percent — fifty people, in a building of any size. A casino floor operated at half capacity, which in this town is a considerably larger number of strangers standing considerably closer together. I know, because I staffed those floors.

The Court declined to intervene in July, and the reasoning was that officials get latitude in an emergency. I understand the principle. I can’t make the arithmetic work. If the standard is risk in a room, the room I work in was more dangerous than the room they closed, and everyone in this valley could see it.

That’s the whole problem with deference. It’s a reasonable doctrine right up until the state has plainly drawn a line for reasons other than the ones it’s stating, and then deference means the court declines to look at the reason.

The November decision out of New York went the other way, and the difference between July and November was a seat rather than a fact. I’d rather have won it on the arithmetic.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — I’m going to defend the deference doctrine, and then explain where I think it broke, because this table will get the second half without the first.

The controlling precedent is a 1905 case about compulsory smallpox vaccination, and what it holds is that in a genuine public-health emergency, elected officials get room to act on incomplete information, because a court isn’t equipped to run an epidemiological assessment and a judge issuing an injunction in April 2020 would have been guessing. The Chief Justice said as much in the California case in May and I thought he was right in May.

Here’s what changed. Deference is calibrated to uncertainty, and uncertainty declines. By November the state of New York was drawing zones on a map with a ten-person cap on worship inside them, while businesses in the same zone operated without a fixed numerical cap. That’s no longer a public-health judgment made under fog. That’s a categorization, and a categorization is exactly the kind of thing a court is competent to examine.

So I’d say the courts handled the spring correctly and were slow to notice the spring had ended. That’s a criticism of timing rather than of the doctrine.

What I’d resist is the conclusion a lot of people are drawing, which is that deference was always a mistake. It wasn’t. It expired.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — I watched a congregation in my county take this personally in a way that a lot of commentary never understood.

These aren’t people who think a virus is a hoax. They’re people who noticed that the liquor store stayed open, the box store stayed open selling everything the closed store sold, and the building where they buried their neighbors was a hazard.

You can explain the epidemiology of singing to me and I’ll listen. What nobody explained was why the assessment was so precise about a hymn and so approximate about everything else.

The courts got there eventually. Eventually is a year, and a year is a lot of funerals somebody attended by telephone.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I want to make an observation about the category rather than the cases.

The American constitutional treatment of religion as a specially protected activity is genuinely unusual, and it is why this question exists in your courts and not in most others. Our churches closed too, and the argument here was conducted as a political and pastoral matter rather than as a rights claim, because the constitutional hook is weaker.

I would not say ours was handled better. It was handled with less scrutiny, which is not the same thing.

What I would draw from your experience is that a right which forces the state to articulate why one gathering is more dangerous than another is a useful discipline even where the state has a good answer. Being made to say the reason out loud is how you find out whether the reason exists.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — The doctrinal question is whether emergency powers get a categorically different standard or the ordinary one applied to unusual facts, and the Court has now answered it both ways within seven months.

That inconsistency is the finding. Two decisions with the same facts and different outcomes, separated by a change in the Court’s composition rather than by any change in the epidemiology.

I’d say the November approach is the better law and the July approach was the more honest description of what a court can actually assess in an emergency. Those two sentences are in tension and I don’t think there’s a clean resolution.

What I’d want from the episode is a rule stated in advance for the next emergency, so that we aren’t discovering the standard case by case while people’s obligations are live.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — In a place like mine the church is frequently the only institution left that still meets. The mine closed, the paper closed, the union hall is a building somebody rents for receptions.

So when the church closed too, what closed wasn’t a service. It was the last regular gathering of people who had already lost every other one.

I’m not making a legal argument. The lawyers here can do that. I’m saying that the cost of the closure was calculated as though a congregation were an activity, and in a lot of small places it’s the remaining social infrastructure, and the people making the calculation had no way of knowing that.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — What I’d want from a court is the same thing I want from a permitting decision: state the standard, apply it consistently, and be able to explain to the person you told no why the person next to him got a yes.

The orders mostly failed that test, and they failed it in a way that was visible to anybody without a law degree.

I’d add that a good deal of the damage was done by orders that were probably defensible and were never explained. A limit on indoor singing has a real basis. Almost nobody heard the basis. They heard a number and a category, and a number without a reason reads as an arbitrary exercise of power whether or not it was one.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — We didn’t close churches, which puts me in an odd position on the constitutional question.

Our approach was guidance and a lot of congregations moved outdoors or spaced out on their own. It mostly worked in the spring, and then in the autumn we had the worst outbreak in the country and some of those same congregations were part of it.

So I can’t tell you the permissive approach was vindicated. What I can tell you is that nobody here experienced the state as having chosen against them, and when the autumn came and people were asked to be careful, a lot of them were.

Whether that trade was worth it is a real question. I’d want it counted honestly rather than settled by whichever answer suits.