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What\u27s The Beef With Tax Credits? Feeding California’s Animal Production Industry
Get PDFCalifornia’s animal production industry is a powerhouse in the United States food supply chain. In 2021, California generated 12.8 billion in gross cash income from animal production alone, ranking California’s animal production industry as #7 among the states. However, most small farms reported net losses. This paper identifies two financial issues plaguing California’s small farms in the animal production industry: monopolization, and the cost of complying with California’s heightened standard for ethical animal production.
First, the monopolization of small farms is a nationwide issue. In 2022, only four companies controlled 85% of meat packing in the United States. Large companies purchase meat and animal products through contract sales with small farms, allowing the large corporations to control the purchase price of those meat and animal products. Although antitrust laws apply to agriculture, courts have been reluctant to prevent the monopolization of small farms.
Second, in 2018, California voters passed Proposition 12, the Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act, to raise the standard for ethical animal production for veal, calves, chickens, and breeding sows. For breeding sows, the National Pork Producers Council estimates the cost to comply with Prop. 12 is 3,500 per sow.
California does not do enough to protect small farms from these two issues. To better aid small farms, avoid monopolization, and comply with Prop. 12, California should issue tax credits to qualifying small farms that have expenditures related to compliance with Prop. 12. The tax credit would be modeled after the proposed California Farm Bill (AB 2166, 2018) and would consider the United States Department of Agriculture’s California Census of Agriculture data and reports
Today’s Pirates: Biopiracy, biotech, and the international frameworks that are not up to the challenge.
Get PDFThis paper analyzes biopiracy and its effects on Indigenous populations through case studies on specific incidences of biopiracy, and an analysis of modern day agro-neocolonialism, seed piracy, and advances in biotech that are changing modern patent landscapes. This paper suggests that current international frameworks are failing to defend against widespread biopiracy due to ineffective cross-cultural application of relevant treaties and differing domestic approaches to intellectual property frameworks. This paper examines the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, The Convention on Biological Diversity, The Bonn Guidelines, and The Nagoya Protocol. This paper then makes suggestions for the international community as a whole and for the United States on how to protect against future threats of biopiracy, including technological advancements, such as Digital Sequencing Information (DNA sequencing/synthesis) and CRISPR-Cas9
The Purpose and Practice of Precedent: What the Decade Long Debate Over Stare Decisis Teaches Us About the New Roberts Court
Get PDFThe Supreme Court’s tectonic decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health upended the Doctrine of Substantive Due Process by radically reinterpreting the doctrine of stare decisis. The Court’s established practice regarding stare decisis should have operated to preserve the fifty-year-old abortion jurisprudence. But we should have seen this change coming. Although there has been an intense and involved debate over the purpose and practice of precedent for generations, that debate shifted at the beginning of 2018. Four approaches to stare decisis emerged along a continuum, from complete abandonment of the doctrine and incremental erosion to modernized adherence to precedent. This article examines how six key cases not only laid the foundation for the new stare decisis doctrine articulated in Dobbs, but it considers what we might expect from this Court as the Justices try to convince others to embrace one or a mixture of these four perspectives
Procedural Pluralism: A Model for Enforcing Internal Administrative Law
Get PDFMuch of our federal administrative law relies upon supposedly mandatory procedures that agencies often ignore. So, can the administrative state achieve legitimacy if it is bound by laws that it rarely, if ever, complies with? New data shows that agencies simply ignore administrative procedures without recourse because compliance ultimately depends on who holds power in the administrative state––not congressionally delegated rules or procedures imposed by the President. This article refutes the prevailing assumption that, as the sole powerholder of the entire executive department, the President is responsible for the current state of administrative non-compliance and underenforcement because the President decides not to enforce rules. This presidentially-centered argument relies on two variables: presidential discretion and judicial deference to that discretion. However, in this article, I present new empirical evidence showing that public interest groups influence the enforcement of administrative procedures notwithstanding presidential discretion––even overriding congressional attempts to cabin agency decision-making and sometimes judicial oversight. If these parties can shape how the President can exercise enforcement discretion, then power in the administrative state is in fact pluralistic, rather than presidentially centered. This article contributes not simply to our understanding of internal administrative law, but also illustrates how noncompliance with internal procedures has real world consequences for regulated parties and the federal government at large