Kavanaugh objects as Supreme Court turns away California pig welfare law challenge

The Hill

30-06-2025

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a second bite at the apple to review California's law requiring pork sold in the state to come from pigs raised with sufficient living space.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated he would've taken up the case, but neither he nor the majority explained their reasoning, as is typical.
Two years ago, the court upheld the law in response to a challenge from national pork and farmers groups.
But those groups conceded certain legal arguments, and the Iowa Pork Producers Association hoped to pick up the mantle.
Passed by California voters in 2018, Proposition 12 prohibits pork sold in the state if the breeding pig had less than 24 square feet of usable floor space.
Industry groups say the law effectively requires farmers nationwide to comply given California's size, and they've also criticized the standard as arbitrary.
The legal challenge concerns a doctrine rooted in the Constitution's command that Congress holds the power to regulate interstate commerce.
Known as the dormant Commerce Clause, the doctrine restricts states from impeding that power by discriminating purposefully against out-of-state economic interests.
In the previous case, however, the challengers didn't argue that Proposition 12 discriminated against other states. They explicitly conceded the argument before the court, instead advancing more aggressive theories that the justices rejected in a fractured decision.
The new case provided the court a second bite at the apple, but they declined it.
The Iowa-based group advanced a discrimination claim that revolves around an earlier animal welfare measure that applies to California farmers only. That measure gave the in-state farmers six years to comply, but Proposition 12 gave out-of-state farmers less than six weeks.
'If issues of 'morality' can drive the regulation of out-of-state industry (as was supposedly the case with Proposition 12), why couldn't future regulation be based on minimum wage policies of sister States, or employees' immigration status, or any other hot-button social issue of the day? The Framers prohibited precisely this type of discriminatory and overly onerous out-of-state regulation,' the pork association wrote in its petition.
The group is represented by law firms Husch Blackwell and Brick Gentry.
California urged the court to turn away the challenge, saying the earlier groups conceded the argument because 'it lacks any merit.'
'Proposition 12 enacts a neutral sales restriction that treats in-state and outof-state farmers the same,' the state wrote in court filings.