Talk to anyone in Paramus this year and the American Dream lawsuit comes up the way weather does. Someone mentions the case is still working through Bergen County Superior Court, someone else predicts what happens "if Paramus wins," and the conversation drifts as if the verdict will decide whether Garden State Plaza finally unlocks its clothing racks on a Sunday. It won't. The suit that has occupied court dockets since August 2025 targets a mall ten miles away, built on land Paramus doesn't govern, under a legal theory that may not survive its own standing question. Whatever the judge eventually decides, the Sunday you already live with in this town runs on a rule the lawsuit never touches.
That distinction matters if you've spent any part of the last year assuming the two things were connected. They aren't, and understanding why says more about how Sunday actually works in Paramus than another rehash of "Bergen County still has blue laws" ever will.
Two Malls, One Ordinance, Zero Jurisdiction Over East Rutherford
Paramus doesn't just follow the county's Sunday closing law. It goes further than the county requires. Bergen's blue law bans the sale of nonessential goods like clothing, furniture, and electronics on Sundays, and voters kept that rule in place decades after every other county in New Jersey repealed theirs. Paramus took it a step further, writing its own ordinance to ban nearly all retail activity on Sundays, not just the categories the county law covers, specifically to keep traffic and congestion from swallowing the one day the borough could still feel like a residential town rather than a retail corridor.
That local ordinance is what actually governs Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park Mall on a Sunday. It has nothing to do with American Dream, because American Dream isn't in Paramus. It sits in East Rutherford, on land owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, a state agency whose property carries a different legal footing entirely. Paramus's lawsuit asks a judge to force compliance at a mall it has no direct authority over, which is exactly the problem the court raised out loud this summer.
What the Judge Actually Said in June
At a hearing this June that ran about an hour and a half, attorneys for American Dream and the state sports authority asked the court to dismiss Paramus's case, some counts with prejudice, meaning they could never be refiled. Angelo Genova, representing American Dream, argued the borough had no standing to enforce its neighbor's compliance at all: "Paramus is seeking to act as private attorney general for the closing law," he told the court, adding that the borough was "seeking to enforce rights outside of its borders."
The judge pressed the same point from the bench. If Paramus can sue over something happening in East Rutherford, he asked, where does that end? He also noted that MetLife Stadium, blocks from American Dream, sells merchandise on Sundays during Giants games without objection from Paramus, a comparison the borough's attorney, Leonard Seaman, tried to sidestep by drawing a line between entertainment sales and the roughly 100 apparel and electronics stores the suit targets.
No ruling came out of that hearing. As of the most recent public reporting, no trial date has been set and the motions to dismiss remain pending. Whichever way that goes, the outcome adjusts what happens inside a mall in a different town. It does not touch Paramus's own ordinance, which was never part of what's being litigated.
What Actually Closes, and What Doesn't, on a Paramus Sunday
The practical version of all this shows up at street level, and it splits along lines that surprise people who assume "closed on Sunday" means the whole town goes dark.
| On a Sunday in Paramus | Status |
|---|---|
| Clothing, furniture, and electronics inside Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park Mall | Closed under the borough's own Sunday ordinance |
| Grocery stores, including Trader Joe's on Route 17 North and Stew Leonard's, which occupies the former Sears space inside Paramus Park Mall | Open under the grocery exemption |
| Restaurants, including longtime spots like Steel Wheel Tavern and newer arrivals along the Route 17 corridor | Open |
| Pharmacies | Open |
| Car dealerships | Closed, but this one is a statewide New Jersey rule, not a Bergen County blue law |
That last line is worth sitting with. Not every Sunday closure you notice in Paramus comes from the same law. Car dealerships are shut on Sundays across all of New Jersey, a completely separate statute that has nothing to do with Bergen's blue law fight. It's an easy detail to conflate, and conflating it is part of how the American Dream lawsuit gets misread as a referendum on the whole day rather than one narrow slice of it.
The Stew Leonard's detail is the one that best captures how the exemption actually works. It sits inside the same building as Paramus Park Mall's shuttered retail corridor, in space a Sears department store used to occupy. On a Sunday, you can walk into that grocery store, buy produce and wine, and walk twenty feet to a mall entrance that's locked. Same roof, same parking lot, two completely different legal statuses depending on which door you use. Grocery, pharmacy, and prepared food all clear the "essential goods" bar the ordinance sets. Everything else in that retail footprint doesn't.
Why the Litigation Doesn't Reach Your Block
Put the pieces together and the shape of the thing becomes clear. Paramus's lawsuit is a fight over enforcement authority in East Rutherford, decided by a judge weighing whether a municipality can sue over what happens past its own line. It is not a referendum on the ordinance that actually governs Garden State Plaza or Paramus Park. Those rules were on the books before American Dream opened in 2019, they'll still be on the books regardless of the dismissal motions pending in Bergen County Superior Court, and no plausible outcome in East Rutherford rewrites Chapter 391 of Paramus's own borough code.
The people with real stakes in how the case resolves are commercial tenants and mall operators elsewhere in North Jersey, watching to see whether "we sit on state land" becomes a workable exemption other retail centers can borrow. That's a leasing and zoning question, not a household one. If you live in Paramus, your Sunday was decided a long time ago by a vote your town already took, and it isn't the thing sitting in front of a judge this year.
The Sunday You Can Actually Plan Around
None of this changes what a Sunday afternoon actually looks like if you need something specific. A missing ingredient, a prescription refill, dinner out with visiting family: all of that runs on the normal weekend clock, because grocery, pharmacy, and restaurant hours were never part of the dispute in the first place. What's off the table is the retail concourse itself: no browsing for a jacket at Garden State Plaza, no furniture showroom trip to Paramus Park. That's been true since long before this lawsuit existed, and it will be true no matter which way the pending motions land.
If you're weighing what a Paramus address actually means day to day, not just what a listing says about square footage or school pickup times, this is the kind of detail that only shows up once you've lived with it for a while. The Morales Group works this corner of Bergen County closely enough to know the difference between a headline and a change to your weekend, and we're always glad to talk through what a specific block, not just a zip code, actually feels like to live in.
