Farm Until It's Gone: Industrial Animal Agriculture and the Limits of Law

Abstract

The way meat is produced today in the United States poses interesting challenges for law. A review of the harmful social and environmental impacts of contemporary meat production, when placed alongside the legal protections simultaneously enjoyed by the meat industry, suggests important missing elements from influential theoretical frameworks for analyzing social and environmental externalities. Industrial meat producers appear to be “law makers” more than they are “law takers,” complicating attempts to understand law merely as a precursor to bargaining over legally-endowed entitlements toward socially desirable outcomes.