Comments on: October 13 roundup https://www.overlawyered.com/2011/10/october-13-roundup-2/ Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:03:33 +0000 hourly 1 By: asdfasdf https://www.overlawyered.com/2011/10/october-13-roundup-2/comment-page-1/#comment-127278 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:04:44 +0000 http://overlawyered.com/?p=25043#comment-127278 On the one hand, the harassment of raw milk farmers is sad. But it’s typically a dubious (albeit fully understandable) legal strategy to engage in this kind of transparent subterfuge to try and work around a regulation or ruling with whose legality one disagrees. I know of a number of cases in different fields where angry defendants would try and use some kind of ploy like this, and the problem with it is that it looks bad to a jury and to a judge, and it harms the credibility of the defendant.

I don’t have a better suggestion, of course. I’ve almost never heard of a case of a small business or group of businesses defeating a federal agency in this sort of case – the best that can usually be hoped for is some indignant blog posts, witness the CPSIA posts for instance. The problem with the raw milk producers is that the legal costs of defending themselves, right or wrong, would swamp their profits for years; federal agencies, by contrast, have huge legal teams they can put on these kinds of cases forever.

I don’t mean to sound like an expert in this area of law, I’m not, and of course the raw milk producers should heed the advice of their own lawyers. That said, it still strikes me that for a bunch of farmers to believe they can legally out-maneuver the FDA strikes me as idealistic, if not quixotic. Of course, it’s probably idealists who get into farming in the first place.

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