The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a California law aimed at reducing cruelty in meat production, in a decision holding that California can indeed require that pork sold in the state come from pigs born from sows who have enough room to both turn around and lie down. The pork industry had fought the law, pointing out that California produces almost no pork itself, but consumes about 13 percent of all the pork eaten in this great pork-eating nation. In essence, the pork producers argued that California violated the Constitution's commerce clause by passing a law whose burden falls almost entirely on farms in other states. But because it doesn't give California or any other state an unfair competitive advantage, among other things, the majority decided California's law is kosher, even though it concerns meat that's treyf.

In a narrow 5 to 4 decision that scrambled the usual partisan lineup of justices, Neil Gorsuch, whom you'd usually expect to line up obediently with corporate interests, wrote, "While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list." Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed only partly with Gorsuch's decision, which they believed claimed too limited a role for the Court to take in such cases; Sotomayor wrote in a partial concurrence that the pork producers had at the very least failed to show "a substantial burden on interstate commerce," so they lose, neener neener. (We paraphrase slightly.)