Food Law & Policy: The Fertile Field's Origins and First Decade

Legal knowledge, learning, and scholarship pertaining to the production and regulation of food historically centered around two distinct fields of law: Food & Drug Law and Agricultural Law. The former focuses on the regulation of food by the Food and Drug Administration under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, while the latter examines the impacts of law on the agricultural sector’s production of food and fiber. Neither field—alone or in tandem—focuses in whole or in part on many of the most pressing legal issues that currently impact our food system. Consequently, elements of these two fields converged roughly one decade ago to create a significant and distinct new field of legal study: “Food Law & Policy.” This field explores legal and policy issues well outside the scope of Food & Drug Law and of Agricultural Law to address important questions about food that had never been explored fully within the legal academy. Food Law & Policy embraces a broader study of laws and regulations at all levels of government that impact the food system—covering everything from local regulations pertaining to farmers’ markets or food trucks to federal policies pertaining to obesity or hunger. Food Law & Policy now enjoys a strong and growing presence throughout the legal academy. This Article introduces ten categories of original empirical data to document the field’s vitality—including figures on law school courses, legal scholarship, clinical legal programs, and student societies at U.S. law schools. It details the past and present of Food & Drug Law and Agricultural Law alongside that of Food Law & Policy. The Article demonstrates that Food Law & Policy has proven to be a timely and vibrant addition to the legal academy and suggests next steps in the ongoing development of the field

Tavern Talk and the Origins of the Assembly Clause: Tracing the First Amendment\u27s Assembly Clause Back to Its Roots in Colonial Taverns

The First Amendment to the Constitution is a cluster of distinct but related rights. The freedom of assembly protected therein is one right that Americans exercise every day. With perhaps the exception of speech, assembly is the most widely and commonly practiced action that is enumerated in the Bill of Rights. This freedom is also one of our least understood and least considered rights. Sometimes ignored and other times grouped with other freedoms, the right of those in America to come together peaceably deserves to be studied, respected, and celebrated. To better understand the freedom of assembly in America, one must explore and understand its origins. Tracing the evolution of the freedom of assembly requires placing this freedom within the context of culture. Exploring the origins of the freedom of assembly in the context of culture requires tracing the right-as practiced-back to its fundamental situs, a term that can be used to ground rights in their proper place or places. The proper situs of the Assembly Clause, research reveals, is in its birthplace: colonial America\u27s taverns. Colonial taverns served not just as establishments for drinking alcohol but as vital centers where colonists of reputations great and small gathered to read printed tracts, speak with one another on important issues of the day, debate the news, organize boycotts, draft treatises and demands, plot the expulsion of their British overlords, and establish a new nation. In Part II, I trace the early history of taverns in colonial America. In Part III, I discuss the role that colonists assembling in taverns played both in fostering the freedom of assembly and in combating growing British attacks on the rights of American colonists. In Part IV, I analyze the brief but informative legislative history of the Assembly Clause. In Part V, I describe how tavern talk places the situs of the freedom of assembly squarely in taverns. In Part VI, I conclude that in taverns and tavern talk are the origins of the Assembly Clause

Food Law & Policy: An Essential Part of Today\u27s Legal Academy

This Article updates the authors’ seminal 2014 Wisconsin Law Review article, Food Law & Policy: The Fertile Field’s Origins and First Decade, which was the first scholarly work to detail the fascinating origins and explosive growth of the legal field of Food Law & Policy. Using the same ten criteria the authors developed to measure the growth of Food Law & Policy for the 2014 article, this Article measures and details the field’s impressive growth since that time