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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

That there isn't an obvious place to draw the line does not in any way justify drawing the line at a patently absurd position like this court has done. Courts constantly make rulings on issues where the boundaries are somewhat blurry. For just one example, take the infamous line about pornography: "I know it when I see it." They have well-established techniques for reasoning about such cases. It's not perfect, but it can be, and is, done all the time.

This case isn't about canned soup. It's about meat that has been minimally processed, e.g., a side of beef that gets cut into steaks and ribs in the USA. Calling that a "Product of the USA" is absurd. M-COOL sounds great, but this is still stupid.

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The easy solution is to allow for something like "Prepared in the USA", and only allowing "Product of the USA" if the animal was slaughtered in the US.

similar to "Assembled in the USA"

I'm sure consumers will love "Pork Chops: Designed in Texas, butchered in USA from components sourced in USA and elsewhere".

Don’t do that, you end up with the torture that is live imports.

Clear labelling about where they were grown, and where the butchering was done will go a long way towards helping people make informed decisions.

> Courts constantly make rulings on issues where the boundaries are somewhat blurry.

Do you consider that to be a good thing, though? Or, at least, a net good?

My own initial intuition was that it's not OK to add "Product of the USA" to the label if the intention is to mislead the consumer, but there may be other things at play that determine what must or must not be on the label, e.g. tax-related considerations, which, if you ask me, are also frequently arbitrary.

Also, keep in mind that a label with a full history might create information pollution, like with CA Prop 65 labels.

I would consider that to be their primary job function. Especially at the higher levels. The rule of law would break down if they didn't. Laws are like product specs. They cover the core stuff as best they can, but there are invariably areas where they are a bit buggy, ambiguous, and incomplete. We already have problems with loopholes, but if judges weren't allowed to to exercise some degree of reasonable judgement when things are not 100% crystal clear those problems would be orders of magnitude worse.

> My own initial intuition was that it's not OK to add "Product of the USA" to the label if the intention is to mislead the consumer,

And who decides that? A lot of things have blurry lines and I don't know who you expect to clarify them. A court where two sides argue seems like the best solution to me. Not a great solution, but it falls into that quote about democracy being bad but still the best.

Yes, it's a good thing. Otherwise there would be a great number of things our elected representatives would want to execute in law on behalf of their constituencies that they would be unable to do so because the burden of legislating in sufficient detail would be too high.

In fact, there is a legal theory gaining traction in conservative circles that seeks to neuter the federal government by arguing that Congress cannot delegate law-making to the executive branch. They argue that Congress must lay out laws in full detail instead of expressing a general intent and creating executive institutions like the EPA, FTC, and FAA to then elaborate and administer detailed regulations. The effect would be to make our laws brittle and short-sighted.

The agencies are abusing the guidance and rule making processes in ways that are completely absurd.

When I worked in DC, I saw guidance that suggested criminal liability retroactively for selling some financial products.

Lots of petty dictators with no respect for the legislative process or limits of executive power.

For outsiders, it's visible as an unintentional reverse-judgement by a jurisdiction upon itself.

Each legal realm is free to interpret their own language in their own terms, and they do so on an ongoing basis.

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