Federal Judge Denies Injunction Request for COOL Rules
Opponents of country-of-origin labeling (COOL) rules were unable to demonstrate need for an injunction to prevent "irreparable injury" from alleged First Amendment violations, said U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Ketanji Jackson. Jackson denied the injunction request from several U.S. and Canadian meat associations that sought to stop the implementation of COOL rules. The suit was filed in July (see 13071015) after the Agriculture Department's Agriculture Marketing Service issued final regulations in May (see 13052317). The plaintiffs include the American Meat Institute, the American Association of Meat Processors, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association and the National Pork Producers Council.
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The trade groups "appear to conflate the burden that they claim the Final Rule places on their finances with the burden it places on their speech," said Jackson. The plaintiffs argued that the production step disclosure requirement is too burdensome to be related to the government’s interest in preventing consumer confusion, but "in the First Amendment context, it is the burden on speech, not pocketbook, that matters."
The suit was also not convincing in claims that the AMS rules go beyond Congressional intent, the filing said. The meat groups could not point to any "statutory provision that expressly prohibits the AMS from enacting regulations that mandate the disclosure of 'born,raised, and slaughtered' information," it said. "This omission is significant because the COOL statute does expressly require the Secretary of Agriculture, who heads the AMS, to 'promulgate such regulations as are necessary to implement' the law." The claim that the statute expressly allows for commingling of meat from different countries during a single production day is also lacks merit, Jackson said. The statute does not mention commingling and if "if Congress was as supportive of commingling as Plaintiffs insist, one would have expected the COOL statute’s drafters to have inserted language to that effect."
One of the plaintiffs, the North American Meat Association (NAMA), is "sorely disappointed by this decisions," said Olsson Frank lawyer John Dillard, who represents NAMA. Dillard hinted at a continued legal fight but declined to discuss specifics. "The implications of this denial, this decision, is going to have real impacts on the NAMA members," he said. "Some of the NAMA members are going to have to make expensive adjustments to comply with the new COOL rule."
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