SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – A California federal court has refused to throw out a lawsuit that challenges the state’s coffee-causes-cancer label.
On Aug. 27, Judge Kimberly Mueller rejected Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s motion to dismiss the claims of the California Chamber of Commerce. At issue is the placement of acrylamide on the state’s notorious Proposition 65 list.
Companies that make products with substances on the Prop 65 list are required to include warning labels that say the products may cause cancer. Acrylamide is present in coffee and the subject of dozens of state court lawsuits.
“(T)he desirability of avoiding piecemeal litigation and the fact federal law applies both favor retaining jurisdiction, while the order in which the forums obtained jurisdiction favors remanding to state court,” Mueller wrote. “The balance of factors favors retaining jurisdiction.”
Becerra has claimed there is “strong evidence” from decades of research that acrylamide causes cancer in lab animals. CalChamber says small and large businesses must warn customers about it or face penalties of $2,500 per unit sold.
“Many businesses have been sued to date by both the Attorney General and private enforcers. But because acrylamide forms naturally during cooking and is found in thousands of food products many more businesses remain to be sued,” CalChamber says.
In earlier court documents, CalChamber said more than 100 companies have received notices of violation related to acrylamide since it initiated its lawsuit last year.
“The costs of Proposition 65 litigation, the one-sided nature of its enforcement regime, and the incentives it provides for enforcement by bounty hunters make it uneconomical — deliberately so — for individual businesses to vindicate their First Amendment rights on a case-by-case basis,” CalChamber wrote.
The Council for Education and Research on Toxics is a driving force behind Prop 65 litigation, having sued Starbucks and more than 80 other coffee retailers.
An acrylamide cancer warning was imposed when CERT received a favorable state court decision in its litigation, which was followed by a regulation from the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment that would have nullified it.
CERT is challenging that regulation, and the judge hearing it has decided to defer to the judge who imposed the warning label.
Becerra argued that private Prop 65 enforcers like plaintiffs lawyers and their clients can’t be classified as “state actors” when he filed his motion to dismiss. Mueller wrote CalChamber has sufficiently pled that there is a credible threat of enforcement by Becerra’s office.