Chicago’s silly anti-foie gras law is taking effect next week (see Jun. 8 and links therein), but a planned commerce-clause lawsuit against the ban (via Wallace, whose post has a lot of good links on similar bad laws and proposals) is even more silly. In 1995, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an even sillier nanny-state ordinance against spray paint sales that was also challenged on commerce clause grounds: “Just as the Constitution does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, so it does not enact prescriptions from the pages of The Journal of Law & Economics—where, we may assume, an article will appear in due course adding this ordinance to the long list of laws whose costs exceed their benefits.” (Full disclosure: I was a clerk for the author of that opinion at that time.)

Filed under: animal rights, foie gras