Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic has joined the battle over California’s Proposition 12 in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The clinic’s attorneys filed an amicus brief in support of Prop 12 Monday on behalf of a coalition of animal protection organizations and law professors.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 11.

Approved by California voters in 2018, Prop 12 establishes minimum space requirements for breeding pigs, calves raised for veal and egg-laying hens within the state. It also bans the sale of pork, veal and eggs from animals raised elsewhere if their living conditions don’t meet California’s standards.

National Pork Producers Council and American Farm Bureau Federation sued the California Department of Food and Agriculture in December 2019 on the grounds that Prop 12 violates the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause in banning the sale of out-of-state pork from animals confined in a manner inconsistent with California standards.

The U.S. District Court for Southern California dismissed the case in April 2020.

In the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the petitioners argued the measure compels out-of-state producers to change their operations to meet California’s standards, impermissibly regulating extraterritorial conduct outside the state’s borders.

In July 2021, the court disagreed, saying Prop 12 does not dictate the price of products and does not tie the price of in-state products to out-of-state prices and does not violate the underlying principles of the commerce clause.

In its brief, Harvard’s clinic argued the Court of Appeals correctly held that Prop 12 does not burden interstate commerce and, moreover, the petitioners failed to adequately state a claim regarding the economic burden actually imposed by the initiative.

“Petitioners’ argument is premised on the erroneous assertion that the initiative ‘effectively’ requires group housing. However, although Pork Producers can opt to use group housing as a means of satisfying the initiative, they can also satisfy the conditions of the initiative by using larger stalls,” the brief stated.

Their complaint fails to allege that this option would cause them undue economic harm that is “excessive” in relation to the local benefits conferred by the initiative, it said.

“Proposition 12 also confers important local benefits, long recognized as falling within the purview of state regulation — the protection of the public health and morals by prohibiting the in-state sale of products produced via cruel confinement practices,” the brief said.

The initiative ensures that California residents, who overwhelmingly voted for this legislation, are not complicit in the production of meat products by “cruel” means, and that those Californians who wish to consume pork can do so without contributing to such “cruelty,” it said.

“Contrary to the allegations made in petitioners’ complaint, the confinement practices prohibited by Proposition 12 are demonstrably cruel and inhumane with highly detrimental impacts on the physical and psychological welfare of female pigs,” the brief said.

In a press release, Rebecca Garverman, an attorney and clinical fellow at Harvard, said Prop 12 addresses practices that condemn a pregnant pig to spend most of her reproductive life in a tiny crate.

“Our brief illustrates the cruelty and inhumanity of this kind of confinement with photographic and videographic evidence of pigs suffering in these horrific gestation crates,” she said.