NEW YORK — New York City could strip strippers of their constitutional rights if its outdated rules governing triple-X businesses are allowed to stand, a Proust-quoting federal judge said Monday.

The 2001 zoning rules could kill off many of the city’s remaining jiggle joints by forcing them out of their current locations, violating their First Amendment right to “adult expression,” U.S. District Judge William Pauley ruled.

“The adult-use regulations that are the subject of these now-revived constitutional challenges are a throwback to a bygone era,” Pauley wrote as he issued an injunction to stop the city from enforcing the rules.

Click Here: Cheap Chiefs Rugby Jersey 2019

“The City’s landscape has transformed dramatically since Defendants last studied the secondary effects of adult establishments 25 years ago,” Pauley continued, quoting the French 20th-century novelist to undergird his point. “As Proust might say, ‘the reality that [the City] had known no longer existed,’ and ‘houses, roads, [and] avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.'”

Pauley’s ruling does not immediately change the regulatory scheme for sex-based businesses, as the city has agreed not to enforce the rules at issue while legal challenges to them wend their way through the courts.

But in suggesting the regulations may run afoul of merchants’ constitutional rights, the judge handed strip club and adult bookstore owners a victory in a legal battle that goes back to the 1990s.

A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department noted Pauley did not say whether the business owners will ultimately score a win in their Manhattan federal court lawsuit, which was originally filed in 2002. The plaintiffs include the New York Dolls, Satin Dolls and Private Eyes strip clubs.

“This ruling, as the Court reiterated, says nothing about whether the adult-only businesses will succeed on the merits of their claims,” Law Department spokesperson Nick Paolucci said. “In fact, the state Court of Appeals ruled for the City in a similar challenge and upheld the zoning regulations at issue here.”

The city first imposed zoning rules in 1995 barring triple-X businesses from opening within 500 feet of a church, a school or another racy establishment. But the regulations only applied to businesses that used at least 40 percent of their floor space for “adult purposes.”

Many strip clubs and bookstores redesigned their spaces or built partitions to take advantage of the loophole, according to Pauley’s decision. That led the city to tighten its rules in 2001 to say that certain naughty businesses had to comply with the distance restrictions regardless of how much space they used for sexy activities.

If they’re enforced, the rules would quicken the demise of a dwindling sex industry for which Times Square was once the heart, strip club and bookstore owners argue.