Of Milk and the Constitution

Central cases in our constitutional law canon share an unexpected similarity: they all arose out of litigation involving cattle and milk. The Slaughter-House Cases, Nebbia v. New York, Carolene Products, and Wickard v. Filburn are familiar to generations of law students as iconic cases that address key concepts such as equal protection, the states\u27 police powers, and Congress\u27 commerce powers. Importantly, they also ground the Supreme Court\u27s dairy jurisprudence -the series of cases about milk and cattle decided between the 1880s and the early 2000s. This Article argues that this dairy jurisprudence expresses an underlying ideology of nutrition, which glorifies milk as nature\u27s perfectfood. In the Court\u27s discourse, milk drinking is channeled through the language of constitutional rights, creating what this Article calls a quasi-constitutionalization of milk. The privileged status of milk is in tension with other constitutional principles, in particular with equal protection, reinforcing race, as well as class, gender, species, and other inequities. Its detrimental effects are particularly salient for racial and ethnic minorities who are more likely to be lactose intolerant than whites of European descent. Despite these problems with milk, dairy jurisprudence could pave the way for the recognition of a broad constitutional right to food, which would benefit all Americans