Pig farm.

Move along, nothing to see here—just a simple case (yawn) about Article III standing.

Or at least that's the message from lawyers for pig and chicken producers currently trying to fend off amicus briefs from top legal scholars and major media organizations. At issue: a so-called "ag-gag" rule that would stymie undercover exposés of industrial agriculture.

I get it—my best friend watched the documentary "Eating Animals" and promptly became a vegan.

Multiple states have tried to enact laws to thwart such stomach-churning investigations of slaughterhouses and industrial farming—statutes that in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Iowa and North Carolina, for example, have been struck down as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

But Arkansas may have found a work-around— a civil statute with steep penalties for "unauthorized access to property" and a private right of action that farmers can invoke against investigators.

It's a tricky case. My instinct is always to side with journalists and free speech, but the defendants make a solid argument that the controversy is not yet ripe. 

That's not the best part right now though—it's the reaction on Tuesday by deeply offended law professors when defense counsel questioned their insight as proposed amici. "[I]t seems impossible to believe that defendants are not aware of the experience of amici," the legal scholars spluttered indignantly. "Defendants' contention that the deans and law professors do not have any 'special insight' from which to provide to this court their views on the constitutional matters at issue here is plainly wrong."

But first, some background on the case.

Last year, animal rights activists preemptively sued pig farm Prayer Creek Farm and its operator, Deann Vaught—the state representative who was the lead sponsor of the 2017 Arkansas ag-gag bill—as well as a chicken producer Peco Foods Inc. in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund, Animal Equality, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Food Chain Workers Alliance claimed that they'd planned to investigate both facilities, but the threat of hefty monetary penalties under the ag-gag law is preventing them from doing so, in violation of the First Amendment.

They asked U.S. District Judge "Jay" Moody to declare the law unconstitutional and enjoin its enforcement. Instead, he dismissed their complaint, ruling that it did not satisfy the requirements that an injury be "concrete and particularized" and "actual or imminent."

That decision is now on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

David Muraskin of Public Justice, who represents the plaintiffs, argues that Moody got it wrong.

"[T]he district court created a significant loophole to First Amendment protections—empowering the state to tilt the marketplace of ideas until a person is willing to violate a law and risk sanction to vindicate their free speech rights—and contradicted a variety of precedent that has held plaintiffs, including those in this case, have standing based on equivalent facts," he wrote.

The defendants, on the other hand, argue that they have "done nothing except engage in lawful business in Arkansas and other states to provide safe, affordable food to those who chose to purchase it," wrote Peco Foods lawyer Michael Heister of Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull in Little Rock. "Peco has never brought a civil action under the trespass statute, Peco has never said that it might bring such a claim, and Peco, by admission of all the parties, has no such claim against plaintiffs."

It's a meaty issue in an unsettled area of law—just the ticket for amici interest.

A highly-credentialed group of legal scholars—Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky; Alan Morrison, who has argued 20 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court including a seminal decision on commercial speech; Yale Law School's David Schultz; Clay Calvert, the director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida; Heidi Kitrosser of the University of Minnesota Law School, as well as John Preis, Cynthia Boyer, Eric Fink, Justin Pidot and Alexander Reinert—asked the Eighth Circuit to weigh in as amici on the side of the plaintiffs.

They wrote that they "respectfully believe that their expertise and their years of studying First Amendment and prior restraint issues will be helpful to this court as it weighs the important issues before it."

Heister's response? That the scholars "have no insight to provide the court on the issue before the court, which is a straightforward application of Article III's standing requirements."

They "have not demonstrated any special interest or insight they can share on the sole issue raised by plaintiffs' appeal," he continued, adding that their "proposed brief is irrelevant."

The legal scholars did not appreciate this one bit, calling his claims "rather extraordinary and manifestly incorrect."

The amici "seek to express their views because in many cases First Amendment jurisprudence has been at the core of their professional work, study, teaching, and writing," wrote Mark Bronson of Newman Bronson & Wallis in St. Louis on their behalf.

"What is missed by the defendants and was missed by the court below is that constitutional 'standing' does not occur only after a violation but rather when the prospect of the enforcement of a statute "chills" the prospective conduct, thereby preventing protected speech from occurring in the first place," Bronson wrote. "Amici request that this court accept the filing of their brief."