The following excerpt is from Garcia v. S.U.N.Y. Health Sciences Center, 280 F.3d 98 (2nd Cir. 2001):
Several baseline considerations are applied under the Fourteenth Amendment to determine whether such a rational relationship in fact exists. First, the classification is permissible so long as "there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification." See Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 320, 113 S.Ct. 2637, 125 L.Ed.2d 257 (1993) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Second, "[a] State ... has no obligation to produce evidence to sustain the rationality of a statutory classification." Id. "A statute is presumed constitutional and [t]he burden is on the one attacking the legislative arrangement to negative every conceivable basis which might support it." Id. (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). And finally, because "[t]he problems of government are practical ones and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations," the fit between the classification and the asserted government justification may be "imperfect" and may "in practice ... result[] in some inequality." Id. at 321, 113 S.Ct. 2637 (internal quotation marks omitted).
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