1. Food Law and the Transactional Clinic
Jonathan Brown
Director, Food and Beverage Law Clinic
Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University

2. Pace’s Food and Beverage Law Clinic
All clients are small farms, food and beverage businesses, or related nonprofit organizations
Transactional legal representation including
More traditional transactional clinic fare (business formation, tax exemption, contract drafting, etc.)
Farm/food/beverage specific work (food safety, labeling, agricultural land use, institutional procurement, alcohol distribution, etc.)

3. Theory Behind the Clinic
Partnership with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) regional food policy team: “PACE-NRDC Food Law Initiative”
Conceived to provide legal infrastructure to complement broader policy initiatives supporting more just and sustainable food systems
Laurie Ristino,, Back to the New: Millennial and the Sustainable Food Movement, 15 Vt. J. Envtl. L. 1, 22 (2013): “[t]o date, the focus of local government, nonprofits, and others has occurred around policy infrastructure for the sustainable food movement The policy work done to date is a fine start, but without the legal infrastructure to undergird policy, it will have limited traction in our rule of law society.”

4. Mixing Food and Transactional Clinics: Experience for Students
“The [food] system’s diversity of activities, actors, and legal issues, and its commercial nature, means experiential programs of diverse design and purpose can find relevant transactional, policy, and other non-litigation projects. . . The sector provides rich soil for the growth of new lawyers.”
Jay A. Mitchell, Getting into the Field, 7 J. Food L. & Pol'y 69, 84–85 (2011).

5. Mixing Food and Transactional Clinics: Client Need
Dearth of pro bono resources in rural areas and for farm/food/beverage-specific matters
Typical small business needs combined with complex regulatory space
Added opportunities and challenges that come with the new “food movement”
For example, direct-to-consumer farmers: CSA arrangements, value-added products, agri-tourism, IP, volunteer labor, farm-to-institution, etc.

6. Unique Issues for “Local” Food
For example, small farms marketing directly to consumers face traditional “agricultural law” issues, but also potentially:
CSA arrangements
Value-added products
Agri-tourism
Volunteer labor
Intellectual property
Farm-to-school
Traditional ag issues: land access, financing, employment, estate planning, farmland preservation, farming cooperatives, etc.

7. Practicing “Food Law”: Like Practicing “The Law of the Horse”?
“Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on the ‘Law of the Horse’ is doomed to be shallow and miss unifying principles.” Frank H. Easterbrook, Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse, 1996 U. Chi. Legal F. 207 (1996)

8. Food as Organizing Principle for Transactional Clinic
Interconnected Legal Issues
Farmland tenure-related matter can touch upon real estate, tax, business entity choice, estate planning, agricultural land use, conservation law
Relationships and Networks
Connection to Policy

9. Food and Social Enterprise
Clinic clients have included:
Urban food hub
Shared use community kitchen
Nonprofit farms
Farmland access impact investment fund
Craft brewery w/ re-entry program
Small, direct-to-consumer farms
Community land trust for farms?
Urban farming cooperative?
Examples of Clinic clients. “Social enterprise” used in broad sense. In my experience, biggest advantage of mixing the public interest clinic model with this area.

10. Range of Clinic Projects
More typical transactional work:
Small juice company bringing in partners on sweat-equity basis (employment, corporate)
Tax exempt orgs with a twist:
Farm creating non-profit (food pantry donations and education) split off from remaining for-profit business
Very food-specific:
Farm with unique CSA arrangement and food safety law issues
First: interesting/challenging project, nothing food-specific about issues.
Second: could also be done by most transactional clinics, but some interesting farm-related stuff: working with a number of nonprofits in farming area creates some institutional knowledge on particular issues, and involved some fun stuff like subleasing between two entities, documenting sale of seeds/seedlings and leasing of farm equipment
Third: very food/farm specific. Understanding CSA arrangements and how this one is different, researching food safety laws, etc.