The Supreme Court ponders animal welfare

“Miserable, laborious and short”, is how one character describes the life of a pig in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Nearly two-thirds of California’s voters approved a ballot initiative, Proposition 12, in 2018 in an attempt to fix the miserable part. Yet America is supposed to be an integrated market, for pork and everything else. So what looks like an example of a state going its own way in fact requires the justices of the Supreme Court to weigh the “dormant” commerce clause, a constitutional wrinkle that is supposed to prevent states from indulging in protectionism, and whose origins stretch all the way back to a debate about how states might fund lighthouses in the 18th century.