Lines drawn for upcoming skirmish in Raw Milk Revolution*
Posted by: Smiths in UncategorizedSince our last post, a few things have happened. Briefly, we asked in Dec 2007 for the NY Supreme Court to rule that Meadowsweet Dairy, LLC was a private company engaged in maintaining a herd of cows and distributing raw milk from the herd exclusively to the LLC members and were therefore not under the regulatory authority of the NY Department of Agriculture and Markets’ Division of Milk Control and Dairy Services. In Nov 2008, Judge Egan ruled that Milk Control regulations apply to anyone that gives raw milk to anyone else. We decided to appeal that decision and the Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) agreed to represent us in that appeal.
Oral arguments for our appeal will be presented on January 13, 2010 after about 2pm in Albany, NY (State of New York, Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department, Capital Station, Albany, hopefully the physical courtroom can be found through http://www.nycourts.gov/ad3). The written briefs have all been filed and the hearing in January, so I’m told, will allow the Justices to question the opposing attorneys with 10 minutes alloted to each side.
This post’s purpose is to provide access to the briefs. If you have comments on them you can try to send them in but I can’t guarantee they will see the light of day. We tried to turn commenting on once upon a time but we were so overloaded with spam that we opted for the simple solution of turning commenting off. Now I see that the comments have all been saved and someday I may sift through them and investigate reenabling commenting. But don’t hold your breath.
Gary Cox of the FTCLDF filed a 46 page Appeal Brief.
The Department of Agriculture and Markets subsequently filed their 18 page Respondent’s Brief.
Finally, the Petitioners (that’s Meadowsweet represented by FTCLDF) filed a 12 page Reply Brief.
They are a bit wordy and somewhat repetitious but there are gems in there. Happy reading!
*”Raw Milk Revolution” may be trademarked or copyrighted since David Gumpert has authored a book by that name and info on it can be had at amazon or thecompletepatient.com. Hope our title comes under the fair use clause.