Federal judge rejects Missouri lawsuit challenging California egg law

A federal judge in California has blocked Missouri's lawsuit challenging a California state law affecting egg production.

U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, in Fresno, ruled late Thursday that Missouri and the five other states didn't have the legal standing to sue because they failed to show that the California law does genuine harm to its citizenry instead of just possible future damage to some egg producers.

Eric Slusher, a spokesman for Attorney General Chris Koster, said in an email: "We disagree with the federal court's opinion that Missouri lacks standing to defend its businesses and consumers against burdensome economic regulation imposed by out-of-state legislatures.

"We are reviewing our options for further proceedings to resolve the important constitutional questions raised by this suit and left unanswered by the court's summary dismissal."

Missouri Farm Bureau President Blake Hurst said the court's dismissal of the lawsuit "is a lose-lose proposition for all concerned - California egg producers who must comply with a costly, unnecessary and unconstitutional state law; other egg producers who cannot market eggs to California consumers without also complying with this contrived state law; California consumers who will pay higher prices for eggs; and American farmers throughout the nation who can expect similar marketing restrictions to affect their products. We look forward to further action on this matter."

But the Humane Society of the United States, which helped California defend the law, praised the trial court for dismissing a "baseless lawsuit."

In a news release, Jonathan Lovvorn, the HSUS' chief counsel for animal protection litigation, said: "The Judge's opinion not only found that Attorney General Koster and the other attorneys general do not even have standing to file their case, but that their entire theory for why California's food safety and hen protection law will harm egg farmers is totally without merit."

Koster filed the lawsuit on Feb. 3. Five other states - Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky and Iowa - joined the suit on March 5.

They complained that a 2008 voter-approved law in California, called Proposition 2, required that state's egg producers change the way hens are kept while they lay eggs, starting next year - including a mandate that egg-laying hens be kept only in enclosures providing "sufficient room for each hen to stand up, lie down, turn around freely and fully extend their limbs."

The lawsuit said that current, conventional cage systems used throughout the nation house between four and seven birds per cage, with about "67 square inches of space per bird," while the new requirements would mean "anywhere from 87.3 square inches to 403 square inches per hen, depending on how the statutory language is interpreted."

And more problematic, the lawsuit argued, was a 2010 law passed by California's legislature requiring other states' egg farmers "to comply with behavior-based enclosure standards identical to those in Prop 2 if they want to continue selling their eggs in California."

That violates the federal Constitution's Commerce Clause, Missouri and the five other states argued.

The Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8, gives Congress the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

The lawsuit said: "By conditioning the flow of goods across its state lines on the method of their production, California is attempting to regulate agricultural practices beyond its own borders.

"Worse, the people most directly affected by California's extraterritorial regulation - farmers in our states who must either comply with (the 2010 California law) or lose access to the largest market in the United States - have no representatives in California's legislature and no voice in determining California's agricultural policy."

Among its examples of the California law's effect on others, the lawsuit noted Missouri exports one-third of the eggs produced here to California - more than any other state except Iowa.

The California law means Missouri producers would have to "decide whether to invest over $120 million in new hen houses or stop selling (eggs) in California," the suit argued. "The first option will raise the cost of eggs in Missouri and make them too expensive to export to any state other than California.

"The second option will flood Missouri's own markets with a half-billion surplus eggs that would otherwise have been exported to California, causing Missouri prices to fall and potentially forcing some Missouri producers out of business."

But, Mueller wrote: "It is patently clear plaintiffs are bringing this action on behalf of a subset of each state's egg farmers, not on behalf of each state's population generally."

She also ruled that the suit can't be refiled or amended, though the states can appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Associated Press contributed information used in this story.