‘Rules the Roost’: Trump-Appointed Judge Tosses Lawsuit Challenging California Egg Regulations in Pun-Filled Ruling

“Angry chicken” by Stewart Black, CC BY 2.0

A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump tossed a lawsuit his administration filed challenging California chicken farming regulations claiming they were illegally inflating egg prices — and dropped a number of eggcellent puns throughout the ruling.

Inflation was a key issue in Trump’s 2024 campaign, and the price of eggs has been a sore point for the administration from the beginning of Trump’s second term. At one point last year as concerns about further inflation for eggs and other groceries spiked amid the new tariffs Trump imposed, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins suggested that Americans who were worried about egg prices resort to raising their own chickens.

The lawsuit in question was filed by the federal government against California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), and several other California officials to challenge the state’s laws and regulations that restricted sales and shipment of chicken eggs when the hens were confined in certain “cruel” conditions.

The Trump administration’s argument was that California’s egg laws “contributed to the historic rise in egg prices” and “have diminished the purchasing power and prosperity of the American worker,” but were illegal because they were preempted by the federal Egg Products Inspection Act (“EPIA”).

“[I]t is the prerogative of the federal government alone to regulate the quality, inspection, and packaging of eggs,” the Trump administration asserted in the complaint, arguing that California should not be able to “inflate egg prices by imposing additional standards that regulate the quality of eggs.”

Judge Mark C. Scarsi was nominated by Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, with the Senate confirming his nomination in 2020. He previously presided over Hunter Biden’s federal tax case, accepting his guilty plea for all charges in September 2024 just before jury selection was set to begin.

In an 11-page opinion, Scarsi ruled that the complaint should be dismissed because the Trump administration had failed to establish standing.

Presumably far more interesting to many readers than the minutiae of federal civil procedure are the numerous chicken-and-egg-inspired puns Scarsi laid throughout those eleven pages.

Among the quotes inspired by the noble Gallus gallus domesticus from the opinion were characterizing the lawsuit as “[s]eeking to enforce the pecking order between federal and state laws,” referring to “a clutch of intervenors” being granted leave to join the case, establishing that a certain legal standard for motions to dismiss “rules the roost here,” saying that the Trump administration “put all its eggs” in the basket of one specific legal theory of standing, and declaring that “unlike with the chickens and eggs at issue here, there is no question that an analysis of standing must come first.”

Scarsi dismissed the complaint and further ordered that the Trump administration has fourteen days to file an amended complaint, as long as it complies with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and includes “a redline version tracking all changes” with the filing.

Read the eggcellent opinion here.

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