Food, Animals, and the Constitution: California Bans on Pork, Foie Gras, Shark Fins, and Eggs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animal welfare policies focused on food production cook up significant constitutional controversies. Since 2008, California has tried to ban the sale of certain edible items made from animals. Eaters and farmers challenge these policies, citing economic discrimination and preemption by federal statutes, in violation of the Constitution’s Dormant Commerce and Supremacy Clauses, respectively. This food-and-animal jurisprudence includes pork products in National Meat Association v. Harris (2012); foie gras in Association des Eleveurs de Canards et D’Oies du Quebec v. Harris (2013) and Association des Eleveurs de Canards et D’Oies du Quebec v. Becerra (2017); shark fins in Chinatown Neighborhood Association v. Harris (2015); and eggs in Missouri v. Harris (2016). These cases regard California’s animal welfare policies to ban: pork products from “downer” swine, who are immobile; force-feeding ducks to make foie gras; shark fins used in soup in Chinese cuisine; and eggs from hens housed in battery cages. These policies raise legal questions beyond what is inhumane, forcing courts to decide if Californian food choices create barriers to interstate commerce or conflict with federal food statutes on meat, poultry, and marine conservation. This Article argues that state-level food policies improving animal treatment will face judicial inquiry, balancing preventing animal cruelty with federal concerns for economic discrimination, uniformity, and costs passed on to eaters and food producers. This Article identifies how California policies exemplify larger conflicts placing states and animal advocates against eaters and farmers. Constitutional law will serve as an important ingredient to settle these stewing conflicts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".