Cases

Everyone should be able to work in conditions that are dignified, fair, and healthy, and getting injured at work should never mean losing your income or ability to take care of your family. However, for the past 17 years undocumented workers in Michigan who suffer serious workplace injuries have been unjustly denied workers’ compensation wages while they are recovering.

Everyone should be able to work with dignity and access resources that better their working conditions and lives. However, agribusiness interests have threatened Colorado farmworkers’ right to access essential services where they work. Agricultural workers tend to be isolated and work long hours. Many live...

R-CALF challenges the checkoff’s First Amendment violations (R-CALF v. Vilsack et al., D. Mont.) We were lead counsel on behalf of the nation’s largest organization of independent cattle producers, R-CALF USA, in a suit raising a First Amendment challenge to the administration of the Beef...

Food & Water Watch, represented by FarmSTAND (formerly the Food Project at Public Justice), filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia against Smithfield Foods, alleging that the multinational meat processing company repeatedly lied to consumers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic so...

This case is a dispute over the dramatic expansion of a dairy operation. The authority of local government hangs in the balance.

Amazon is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world—yet its policies deprive its delivery drivers of basic labor rights, including the right to bathroom breaks. Under Amazon’s brutal work quotas and elaborate surveillance systems, many drivers resort to urinating in bottles...

Iowa’s second effort to prevent journalists or activists from entering livestock facilities under false pretenses to report on animal abuse was passed and signed into law just two months after U.S. District Judge James Gritzner ruled that Iowa’s law passed in 2012 violated the First...

A just, healthy, and thriving food system requires transparency. Public Justice engages in litigation to strike down the Ag-Gag laws that penalize whistleblowers who expose the truth about the factory farm system.

FarmSTAND (formerly the Food Project at Public Justice) is lead counsel on behalf of a coalition of public interest groups in a constitutional challenge to North Carolina’s “Anti-Sunshine” law—a statute that, like Ag-Gag laws, allows employers and property owners to sue undercover investigators who wish...

Hormel wants you to make the “Natural Choice.” Documents we’ve made public reveal how that is anything but.

In October 2012, the Center for Food Safety and the Community Association for Restoration of the Environment (CARE) warned four major Yakima Valley (Wash.) factory farms that they would take them to federal court unless the farms stopped contaminating local drinking water supplies with runoff from their dairy operations...

FarmSTAND (formerly the Food Project at Public Justice) served as lead counsel representing the nation’s largest organization of independent cattle producers, R-CALF USA, and the Cattle Producers of Washington, in a suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The suit alleged that USDA regulations enacted...