662
Opinion of the Court
City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, Inc., 455 U. S. 283 (1982), where we applied the "well settled" rule that "a defendant's voluntary cessation of a challenged practice does not deprive a federal court of its power to determine the legality of the practice." Id., at 289. Although the challenged statutory language at issue in City of Mesquite had been eliminated while the case was pending in the Court of Appeals, we held that the case was not moot, because the defendant's "repeal of the objectionable language would not preclude it from reenacting precisely the same provision if the District Court's judgment were vacated." Ibid.
This is an a fortiori case. There is no mere risk that Jacksonville will repeat its allegedly wrongful conduct; it has already done so. Nor does it matter that the new ordinance differs in certain respects from the old one. City of Mesquite does not stand for the proposition that it is only the possibility that the selfsame statute will be enacted that prevents a case from being moot; if that were the rule, a defendant could moot a case by repealing the challenged statute and replacing it with one that differs only in some insignifi-cant respect. The gravamen of petitioner's complaint is that its members are disadvantaged in their efforts to obtain city contracts. The new ordinance may disadvantage them to a lesser degree than the old one, but insofar as it accords preferential treatment to black- and female-owned contractors— and, in particular, insofar as its "Sheltered Market Plan" is a "set aside" by another name—it disadvantages them in the same fundamental way.3
3 At bottom, the dissent differs with us only over the question whether the new ordinance is sufficiently similar to the repealed ordinance that it is permissible to say that the challenged conduct continues—or, as the dissent puts it, whether the ordinance has been "sufficiently altered so as to present a substantially different controversy from the one the District Court originally decided." Post, at 671. We believe that the ordinance has not been "sufficiently altered"; the dissent disagrees. As for the merits of that disagreement, the short answer to the dissent's argument that this case is controlled by Diffenderfer v. Central Baptist Church of Miami,
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