WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday backed a California animal cruelty law that requires more space for breeding pigs, a ruling the pork industry says will lead to higher costs nationwide for pork chops and bacon.
“While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion for the court.
Industry groups have said the law would mean expensive, industry-wide changes even though a majority of the farms where pigs are raised are not in California, the nation’s most populous state, but instead in the Midwest and North Carolina.
A majority of the high court agreed that lower courts had correctly dismissed pork producers’ challenge to the law. Both liberal and conservative justices were a part of the majority, though they were not united in their reasoning.
Gorsuch said the pork producers challenging the law were asking the justices to “fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of States to regulate goods sold within their borders.” The justices declined.
Four justices would have sent the case back to continue in lower courts. Chief Justice John Roberts was joined in that view by fellow conservative justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and liberal Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson.
Obey