Supreme Court Rejects Case Involving California Meat Regulations
The court declined to hear the case, even with a coalition of 20 other states joining the petition.
The US Supreme Court will not hear arguments in the case of the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) versus Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California.
The case revolves around California’s Proposition 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The regulations cover things such as freedom of movement for farm animals and minimum floor space required for sows and hens, and they prohibit farmers from “knowingly” causing animals to be confined in a cruel manner or participating in the sale of animals or animal products that were confined in such a way.
Crucially, these regulations do not just impact producers in California. They also ban the sale of pork or veal products from out-of-state producers, or any international producers, unless they also adhere to the law.
Prop 12 was enacted, with the help of a public vote, in November 2018. Shortly thereafter, NAMI challenged the constitutionality of the law, advancing to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It lost that appeal, and, in February, it applied for the US Supreme Court to issue a writ of certiorari, or an agreement to hear its case. In order to argue its case before the court, four out of nine justices have to agree to hear arguments. Today, the Supreme Court denied its certiorari, meaning it will not hear the appeal.
NAMI was joined in this challenge by a coalition of 21 states, including Indiana, Arkansas, Texas and Wyoming. They argued that California should not be allowed to apply its laws to other states, saying that this initiative would encourage a “patchwork of regulation” and threaten the “free flow of interstate commerce.”
NAMI also argued that Prop 12 doesn’t have a direct benefit for consumers and instead could raise the price of food as producers will be required to keep fewer animals per square foot of space.
Without the appeal advancing to the Supreme Court, the lower court’s decision will stand, meaning out-of-state producers will still have to comply with California’s regulations.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Supreme Court Rejects Case Involving California Meat Regulations
by Emily Baron Cadloff, Modern Farmer
June 28, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Or they could just stop selling to California. If even 25 percent of the major producer’s stopped the price would sky rocket and there would be shortages. I bet they would repeal that law in weeks.