Warning labels and notices are a common feature of American life. Federal law requires most groceries to display detailed information about their ingredients, calorie content, and other nutritional facts. Federal fuel economy labels inform car buyers how quickly their new vehicle will burn through gas. Surgeon general warnings inform smokers of the dangers presented by tobacco. Employers who employ workers subject to federal minimum wage law must display posters informing these workers of their rights.

And yet, under a decision handed down today by three Republican judges, all of these information labels and more are now in jeopardy.

The decision by a panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit strikes down federal regulations requiring employers to display posters informing workers of their right to organize and other rights under federal labor law. Although the opinion meanders quite a bit, its analysis begins by claiming this result is required by a federal statute protecting employers’ rights to express their views to their employees. That statute provides that “[t]he expressing of any views, argument, or opinion, or the dissemination thereof, whether in written, printed, graphic, or visual form, shall not constitute or be evidence of an unfair labor practice . . . if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.” Although this language says nothing about employers also having the right not to post information they would prefer to keep their workers ignorant of, the three Republican judges fabricate such a right through the power of a rhetorical question:

Suppose that § 8(c) prevents the Board from charging an employer with an unfair labor practice for posting a notice advising employees of their right not to join a union. Of course § 8(c) clearly does this. How then can it be an unfair labor practice for an employer to refuse to post a government notice informing employees of their right to unionize (or to refuse to)? Like the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, § 8(c) necessarily protects—as against the Board—the right of employers (and unions) not to speak. This is why, for example, a company official giving a noncoercive speech to employees describing the disadvantages of unionization does not commit an unfair labor practice if, in his speech, the official neglects to mention the advantages of having a union.

Of course, the easy answer to this rhetorical question is that it can be illegal to punish employers who express their view of unions but not illegal to require employers to inform workers of their rights because that’s what the law says. Typically, judges begin their legal analysis with the language of the law. These Republican judges chose a different path.

Perhaps sensing that their reading of federal law stands on shaky ground, the judges also weave a particularly aggressive reading of the First Amendment into their opinion. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, commercial actors can be required to provide “purely factual and uncontroversial information” to the people they transact with. This is why cereal boxes can be required to display accurate information about the nutritional value of Rice Chex or Froot Loops, but businesses also cannot be forced to endorse a particular political candidate or to advise their workers to join a union. Because the new posters do nothing more than inform workers about uncontroversial facts involving their rights in the workplace, they should be no more invalid than labeling on a cereal box.

Although union-related speech is sometimes treated differently than speech involving sales of goods, the court does not question its applicability to labor decisions generally. Instead, the judges read Zauderer very narrowly — so narrowly that it does not apply unless the corporation required to display information appears poised to deceive their workers or consumers. Because no one “has even suggested that the posting rule was needed because employers are misleading employees about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act,” the court concludes that Zauderer does not apply. If taken seriously, this reasoning would threaten nearly all warning or informational labels required by law. There’s little evidence, for example, that General Mills is actively deceiving consumers about the number of calories in a serving of Count Chocula. Nor are Chevy dealers only required to post fuel efficiency labels if they lie to their customers about how quickly a Suburban burns through gasoline.

If nothing else, today’s decision should be a wake up call to unions and other advocates for workers that everything they care about is threatened so long as vacancies remain on powerful, GOP-dominated courts like the DC Circuit. Today’s decision bears the same resemblance to the law that Westeros bears to New Hampshire. It writes words that simply do not exist into a federal statute, and then fabricates a constitutional right to keep workers and consumers ignorant. The only way to prevent future decisions like this one is to confirm more judges who will do a better job of adhering to the law.

Hours before his scheduled execution at 6 p.m. today, the Mississippi Supreme Court has issued a stay to Willie Jerome Manning, whose death sentence was upheld in a 5-4 court ruling last week even though the state refused to test available DNA evidence, and the FBI deemed major pieces of evidence in the case “unscientific” and “invalid.” As a consequence, Manning will not be executed tonight and will have more time to continue arguing his case.

Late Tuesday afternoon, an 8-1 majority granted Manning’s last-ditch motion, which included new letters from the Department of Justice describing how crucial hair samples were improperly tested, and testimony improperly linked bullets near Manning’s home to bullets at the crime scene. Manning was convicted in the 1992 abduction and murder in part based on testimony that the hair samples were likely his because both he and the hair strands were African American. The trial also featured testimony from a jailhouse informant, which studies have shown is particularly unreliable.

In recent years, several reports and studies have observed the evident skew in favor of business of the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. Thus far, this term has proved to be no exception, with a 6-1 win rate by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And last month, three professors who are prominent in the conservative law and economics movement published what may be the most rigorous study yet on business success before the high court. After analyzing the some 2,000 decisions between 1946 and 2011 under various rubrics for what constitutes a business win before the court, the study confirmed previous conclusions that the Roberts court is significantly more pro-business than its predecessors. What’s more, they found that the most pro-business justices of all since 1946 are George W. Bush’s two appointees to the court: Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito:

As illustrated above, the study also found that five of the top ten justices most favorable to business are currently serving — and they make up the court’s conservative block. It is unsurprising, then, that this court is not only siding with business more, but that it is granting more cases in which lower courts decided against business and overturning those decisions in favor of business interests. The professors explain:

Whether measured by decisions or Justices’ votes, a plunge in warmth toward business during the 1960s (the heyday of the Warren Court) was quickly reversed; and the Roberts Court is much friendlier to business than either the Burger or Rehnquist Courts, which preceded it, were. The Court is taking more cases in which the business litigant lost in the lower court and reversing more of these—giving rise to the paradox that a decision in which certiorari is granted when the lower court decision was anti-business is more likely to be reversed than one in which the lower court decision was pro-business. The Roberts Court also has affirmed more cases in which business is the respondent than its predecessor Courts did.

As a New York Times report on the study notes, prominent among these pro-business decisions are landmark rulings that include the Citizens United decision, a string of decisions eroding the mechanisms for holding corporations accountable as a class, and this term’s Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, which shredded accountability for human rights abuses abroad, including those by corporations with some U.S. presence.

Credit: Advocate for Saving Animals.

Everyone has seen labels on the eggs they buy in grocery stores like “organic” or “free-range.” What most people don’t know is that these loosely defined labels are often fig leaves that cover for the brutal abuse of animals.

But a new lawsuit by animal advocates may have changed all that, pressuring the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday into creating new labeling standards that require egg producers to be honest about what they do to egg-laying chickens.

Egg production is an almost entirely unregulated industry under federal law; a series of special provisions in major animal welfare legislation allows the egg industry to raise egg hens however they please. For example, the Humane Slaughter Act — the principal federal animal welfare law for farm animals — explicitly exempts poultry from the bill’s protections.

The result is an impossibly cruel farm system, where 95 percent of American chickens are raised in tiny, crammed cages that slice their feet, atrophy their muscles and slowly drive them insane. 25 states allow the poultry industry to define “customary” animal welfare practices however it likes to escape animal cruelty laws. One visitor to an egg “farm” saw mummified dead birds crowded in with live birds in tiny cages, thirsty and filthy birds, among other horrors.” A few plants even force their hens to undergo what’s called “forced molting,” depicted in the image above, where hens are starved until they lose their feathers in order to marginally improve egg production and quality.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Americans don’t want to spend their money subsidizing a system that confines hens so cruelly. As a consequence, a complex labeling system has emerged to inform consumers about the humaneness of their various different egg options. Some of the labels, like “Animal Welfare Approved,” are stringent, third-party standards. Others, like “American Humane Certified” and “United Egg Producers Certified,” allow for precisely the sort of brutal caging these labels are ostensibly supposed to guide consumers away from. You can read a guide to the egg guides here.

The new lawsuit, filed by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) and Compassion over Killing (CoK), may render such guides superfluous. The complaint argues that the FDA, by not forcing the industry to describe how eggs are produced in precise terms, is allowing the industry to willfully obscure the way it treats egg hens. As ALDF and CoK put it:

In spite of Congressional mandates, [federal] agencies have failed to take any action to regulate the often-misleading claims and deceptive imagery widely found on egg cartons. Even the United Egg Producers, the U.S. egg industry’s trade association, has endorsed federal legislation containing a similar labeling program.

Under the lawsuit’s petitioned action, egg producers nationwide would be required to clearly label egg cartons with egg production methods, including the identification of “Eggs from Caged Hens.” Co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit include several Bay Area egg consumers who have relied on deceptive egg carton labeling in their efforts to purchase eggs from hens not confined in cages.

On Monday, the FDA caved to the legal pressure. ALDF and CoK have stayed the lawsuit in response to the FDA’s decision to formally respond to a “federal rulemaking petition” on egg labeling by September of this year. Rulemaking petitions are requests from the general public and/or interest groups for a federal agency to change its administrative rules on a particular topic; there’s been an outstanding petition on egg labeling since 2006. The FDA is within its rights to deny the petition, so clearer egg labeling is by no means a given at this point.

Animal cruelty of all sorts is endemic to the American factory farming system. The cruel conditions double as “perfect breeders” for foodborne illnesses.

After a year in which voting lines proved to be a much bigger problem than alleged voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) is gaining traction for his proposal to give himself more power to prosecute such cases. The power to investigate and charge individuals in cases of alleged election fraud now rests with local criminal prosecutors. But under a bill that has now passed in different forms in both houses of the state legislature, that power would be moved to Kobach’s office. The Associated Press reports:

The secretary of state is Kansas’ chief elections official but must refer cases of potential election irregularities to county and federal prosecutors if criminal charges are to be pursued. Even the state attorney general’s office must consult with local prosecutors on such cases.

Kobach said county prosecutors have too many other criminal cases to handle to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively, and the attorney general’s office also has “a very full plate.” He said the secretary of state’s office is most likely to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively and develop expertise in investigating them. [...]

Rep. Jan Pauls, a Hutchinson Democrat, said if legislators want a state official to have the specific authority to prosecute election fraud cases, it should go to the attorney general’s office.

“The AG should be in control of all the prosecutions, or the local district and county attorneys,” she said. “It’s nice to have everybody’s role stay the same as it has been traditionally.”

Kobach’s critics also contend that he’s overstated the potential for election abuses both in pushing for expanded authority for his office and successfully pursuing the photo ID and proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas. Election fraud prosecutions have been relatively few over the past decade, and the state has about 1.7 million registered voters.

But Kobach argues that Kansas appears to have few cases because election irregularities aren’t pursued aggressively. He said his office has found at least 30 cases from the 2012 election in which the name and birthdate of someone who voted in Kansas matched the name and birthdate of someone who voted in another state, suggesting illegal, double voting.

Nationwide, voter fraud is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. When Kobach ran on a platform to fight voter fraud in 2010, investigations found that Kobach’s claims were vastly overstated. Over the course of a five-year period, there had only been seven cases of alleged voter fraud at the local, state, and federal law, and just one of those incidents had been prosecuted. When Kobach floated this bill to assume prosecutorial power last year, a Democratic state representative who questioned Kobach’s slate of potential voter fraud cases found that most of them concerned snow birds who live half the year in Kansas and half elsewhere and may end up registering in two places with no ill intent. ”I can’t wait for him to drag some snowbird off to jail,” Rep. Ann Mah said. Nonetheless, Kobach has continued to tout strict voter ID laws and greater state resources pumped into combating this alleged problem.

Moving prosecutions to Kobach’s office could lead to politicized criminal charges. A former advisor to Mitt Romney, Kobach been a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, and is known for having helped to draft Arizona’s controversial and partially invalidated immigration law, SB 1070, and as a top proponent of strict voter ID laws that disproportionately disfranchise minorities. Kobach was previously counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This year, with more conservative Republicans replacing moderates in the state legislature, the bill seems poised to pass if the houses can reconcile the two versions, as expected, and gain Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) signature.

In California, even medical marijuana dispensaries legally complying with state and local laws are being targeted by the federal government in a new round of crackdowns. But there are many cities and towns in the state that have imposed their own medical marijuana bans. And on Monday, the California Supreme Court dealt one of the biggest blows to the state industry since a law was first passed in 1996, upholding those bans as not preempted by state law. The court ruling upholding a ban in Riverside, Calif. could affect some 200 others jurisdictions that have some sort of dispensary restriction or ban on dispensaries that would be legal under state law but federally illegal (since all marijuana is federally illegal), and resolves conflicting legal rulings by lower California courts. The court explained:

As we have noted, the CUA [Compassionate Use Act] and the MMP [Medical Marijuana Program] are careful and limited forays into the subject of medical marijuana, aimed at striking a delicate balance in an area that remains controversial, and involves sensitivity in federal-state relations. We must take these laws as we find them, and their purposes and provisions are modest. They remove state-level criminal and civil sanctions from specified medical marijuana activities, but they do not establish a comprehensive state system of legalized medical marijuana; or grant a “right” of convenient access to marijuana for medicinal use; or override the zoning, licensing, and police powers of local jurisdictions; or mandate local accommodation of medical marijuana cooperatives, collectives, or dispensaries.

The bans, of course, make it more difficult for the state to implement a legal system for medical marijuana, which is why other jurisdictions have struck down local bans. In Massachusetts, a decision from Attorney General Martha Coakley issued shortly after the passage of that state’s ballot initiative held that Massachusetts law does not allow for flat-out bans of dispensaries, because it would frustrate the law’s “legislative purpose.” Coakley noted, however, that different state laws and structures may dictate different results. What’s more, California’s law differs from those in other states in that it creates a voluntary state-wide system for dispensaries to regulate themselves so that they can comply with state restrictions. Local jurisdictions have their own more specific or mandatory licensing schemes.

One thing Monday’s decision does achieve is suggest why these state marijuana laws are not likely to fall under a legal challenge by federal authorities claiming they are preempted by federal drug law, which some have mulled in response to two state ballot initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana. As the court explains, the state medical marijuana laws “remove state-level criminal and civil sanctions from specified medical marijuana activities,’ but do not create a comprehensive state system, or grant a “right of convenient access.” Other state statutes are somewhat more robust than California’s in licensing state dispensaries. None, however, create a state-run system for dispensing marijuana or a right to use marijuana for any purpose, both of which likely would be preempted by the federal Controlled Substances Act because they create a direct conflict with the criminal law, rather than simply eliminating some actors from punishment under state law.