AG and FARM LAW IN THE UNITED STATES

“A reciprocal obligation exists between the legal profession and every other classification of human endeavor, to achieve a substantial and effective understanding of the other. This obligation has not been met with respect to law and agriculture, and both callings are the poorer because of it.”[1]

Contrary to what may be popular assumption, Agricultural Law as a practice specialty has only developed over approximately the last twenty to thirty years. Before then, “agricultural law” existed more as an academic discipline, with a handful of law school centers devoted to the study of legal issues in agriculture. Even still, academic hostility to the topic quickly stymied some of the first full-fledged efforts to formalize the development of the discipline.[2]

In contrast to the recency of the specialty’s “recognition,” agriculture and the law have shared a complicated relationship since the Civil War, when Congress’ 1862 passage of the Homestead Act first ushered the federal government into the direct promotion of farming.[3]The foundation for the complexity of modern agricultural law was later laid by Franklin Roosevelt’s series of laws enacted through the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which began federalizing the control of production, benefit payments, loans, insurance, and soil conservation.[4]

As the legal relationship between the government, law, and the farmer became more elaborate over the ensuing decades, legal scholars were slow to keep up.[5]Rather, agricultural economists were dominant in the field of agricultural scholarship.[6] The first serious attempt at forming a central and university-anchored center for agricultural law would not come on the scene until the 1960s, and it would fold roughly a decade later—ironically just before the onset of the farm financial crisis of the 1980s.[7]Thus, at best, law students (and really only those in the Midwest) had access only to basic survey courses in agricultural law, covering the application of torts, property, and contracts to the farm, but the professors teaching them would lack the institutional freedom and support to develop it into a robust specialty.[8]The University of Arkansas launched the first LLM in agricultural law in 1980 and the first agricultural law casebook was published in 1985.[9]

The farm financial crisis of the 1980s, in a sense, provided the impetus for agricultural law to develop into a much needed and more independent field. Namely, this was a result of the sudden and dramatic need for legal services to assist farmers in resolving debt disputes, contract enforcement, and for various forms of judicial and legislative advocacy to solve America’s farming policy problems.[10]Adding to this strife, local attorneys quickly found themselves incompetent (in a professional ethics sense), uncertain about, or conflicted out of assisting their neighborhood farmers,[11]and the gap between the farmers in need and up-to-speed attorneys prepared to assist them with a developed body of legal resources was demonstrated to be deeper than feared. 

Thus, in the last few decades, the legal profession has played catch-up in reinforcing agricultural law’s “independent field” status that it has arguably possessed for a century but without the appropriate treatment by practitioners or policy makers. Formed in the wake of the finance crisis, the American Agricultural Law Association, as an example, now boasts over 500 members including students, practitioners, and academics.[12]Still, only three American law schools claim formal LLM programs in the subject.[13] Fewer offer courses taught by educators who see agriculture as an industry to be championed rather than critiqued.

Today, the issues in agricultural law are as numerous as they are complex. With the recognition that agricultural law is a unique field of study and advocacy, one would seldom find an aspect of agricultural advocacy that does not require some in-depth primer on the relationship that farming inhabits with the common and statutory law (at both the federal and state level). Indeed, most farmers now possess some background in advanced business, technology, and manufacturing.[14]With the future of farming only becoming more elaborate and specialized, so too will the nature of its applicable law and policy.

[1]Neil D. Hamilton, The Study of Agricultural Law in the United States: Education, Organization, and Practice, 43 Ark. L. Rev. 509-10 (1990), citing Harold Hannah, Law and Agriculture, 32 VA. L. Rev. 781 (1946).

[2]Id. at 503, 510-11.

[3] https://law.jrank.org/pages/7400/Homestead-Act-1862.html

[4] https://law.jrank.org/pages/4185/Agricultural-Law-History-Agricultural-Law.html

[5]Hamilton, supra. at 510.

[6]Id. 

[7]Id. 

[8]Id. at 516.

[9]Id. at 516, 518.

[10]Id. at 518-519.

[11]Id. at 519-20.

[12] https://farmers.uslegal.com/american-agricultural-law-association/#:~:text=The%20AALA%20has%20over%20500,of%20the%20national%20agricultural%20community.

[13] https://llm-guide.com/schools/usa/concentration/food-law-agriculture-law

[14] https://law.jrank.org/pages/4185/Agricultural-Law-History-Agricultural-Law.html