Supreme Court upholds California law on humane pork sales

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld California’s right to block the sale of pork in the state unless producers abide by more humane regulations on the treatment of pregnant sows.

The decision touched on constitutional issues of interstate trade and splintered the justices outside of their usual liberal-conservative blocs.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing the majority in what boiled down to a 5-4 decision, rejected what he called a request by pork producers for the court to “fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of States to regulate goods sold within their borders.”

“While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list,” Gorsuch wrote for a majority that included Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the case involving California’s humane pork production laws alive but sent it back to a lower court for more work.

The law known as Proposition 12, passed by nearly 63 percent of Californians in 2018, went beyond regulating how pregnant sows are treated in the state, where very little pork is produced. It bans the sale of products derived from sows that are not allowed at least 24 square feet of space and the ability to stand up and turn around in their pens, regardless of where the sows are raised.

The National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation say such a measure violates the Constitution’s restraints on the authority of states to regulate industry beyond their borders. Because of California’s huge market share, the organizations say, pork producers elsewhere would be required to abide by the state’s restrictions.

Farmers from the Midwest and South say they would suffer due to the incredible costs that California’s regulations would impose on the companies that produce pork. Californians consume 13 percent of the nation’s pork, with 99.9 percent of that meat produced beyond the state’s borders.

California argued that its residents chose to pay higher prices so as not to provide a market to products they viewed as morally objectionable and potentially unsafe. Because the law does not attempt to give an unfair advantage to its state’s farmers, California contends the provision does not violate the Constitution.

Other states have required more room for pregnant sows, and a lawyer for the Humane Society of the United States said at oral argument that nine states ban the sale of cosmetics that are tested on animals.