The Supreme Court has a pretty interesting, and potentially very important, "dormant commerce clause" case before it this term—National Pork Producers Council v. Ross. Dormant commerce clause doctrine is a tangled, internally-contradictory mess, and this case gives the Court an opportunity to clarify—or to even more thoroughly mess up—some important principles governing state power in a national marketplace.
The relevant facts (taken here from the opinion below) are straightforward:
California (through Proposition 12, passed by the voters in 2018) bans the sale of uncooked pork products if the seller knows (or should know) that the meat came from a breeding pig that was confined "in a cruel manner." The law defines that to include, among other things, providing less than 24 square feet of living space—roughly the size of two bath towels—per breeding pig. California accounts for around 13% of total pork consumption in the U.S.; virtually all of the pork sold in California (>99%) comes from producers in other States. At present, only around 4% of U.S. pork producers meet California's space requirements for breeding pigs.
