We Need Someone Who Reads 4,000 Pages of Medical Records and Finds the One That Matters.

Marler Clark represents people sickened by E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Cyclospora, Vibrio and botulism — from a single family to a thousand-plaintiff outbreak, tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered since 1993. The companies on the other side are ones you already know — Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms and Boar’s Head. The cases are won or lost in the details, and the details live with our paralegals.

Right now, the details include a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments count at 31,521 people while the federal government counts 9,481, Salmonella Javiana in Sinaloa jalapeños that has sickened 431 in 32 states and set off a recall that now runs to more than 160 grocery products, infant botulism cases against ByHeart and Nara Organics, Listeria from Boar’s Head, Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs, and E. coli from beef kofta, romaine and frozen blueberries. Spend ten minutes on marlerblog.com and you will see the month we just had. Every one of those numbers is a person with a chart, a bill, a lien and a phone number.

The other half of this office is advocacy, and it runs on the same skills. Public records requests to state and county health departments. FOIA to FDA and USDA for inspection reports and environmental assessments and sometimes records in Spanish from a growing region in Mexico — Spanish is a real plus. Fifty health department dashboards read and reconciled every morning. Exhibits and family declarations assembled for a rulemaking petition, a congressional hearing, or a bill. FDA and USDA dockets tracked, and comment letters filed on deadline. The last time we petitioned USDA, six strains of E. coli became adulterants in American beef. That file had to be built by somebody. The same goes for the Outbreak Database and Food Safety News — this office built both and still feeds them. People here get their names on that work, and anyone who wants to speak or write about it is pushed forward, not held back.

We are hiring a paralegal with at least ten years of experience in plaintiffs’ personal injury or complex litigation. Ten years, because we need someone who already knows what a lien is, what a hospital billing department will and will not send you, and how to keep sixty clients straight without losing one. Ten years also because nobody here is going to look over your shoulder — you will run your own files.

Here is what you will not do here. No billable hours and no timesheets — nobody in this office bills by the tenth of an hour. No committee, and no layer between you and the person who decides; when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And no volume: we turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and we would like you to live here rather than commute here. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal — thirty-five minutes from downtown Seattle by boat, a town you can cross on foot, and a trip to work that is a walk or a short drive instead of an hour on I-5. People who make the move tend to stay. But the right person matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help you get here.

What you’ll actually do: run intakes with families who are frightened and exhausted, chase and chronologize medical records, build the damages and lien files that become the settlement demand, assemble the minor’s compromise petitions that put a child’s settlement in front of a judge, manage e-discovery and document productions, calendar and cite-check, coordinate with experts and state health departments, keep cases moving in courts in a dozen states, and travel with us when one of them goes to trial. The work has gone international too — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa.

What you need: a decade in the trenches, mastery of medical records and chronologies, real lien experience — Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA plans and, more often than you would think, the federal government — e-discovery platform experience, absurd organizational instincts, and genuine kindness on the phone: the person calling you may have just buried someone.

What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; and the rare paralegal job where the work actually changes how food is made in this country.

And one last thing. This is not a file-management job. One of our clients wrote that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after. Being that somebody is the job. The people who last here take it personally — they still remember a client’s child by name a year after the case settles, and they are angry that any of it happened at all. If that is you, you will fit here.

The job is open now. Resume and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, tell me about the hardest lien you ever cleared or the record you had to fight hardest to get. marlerclark.com and billmarler.com if you want to know more before you write. No recruiters.

Equal opportunity employer.

Want to Put Us Out of Business? Come Help Us Try.

Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor paralyzed by a hamburger, whose case put the grinding of American beef on the front page of The New York Times and won Michael Moss a Pulitzer Prize. Thirty-plus years later we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered — and there is more work than there are lawyers to do it. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Nebraska Beef, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms, Taco Bell and Boar’s Head.

As I write this, on August 19, 2026: a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments now count at 31,521 people and rising. The federal government called it 1,947 in nine states until it changed what qualifies as a case in August; its own number is now 9,481 in seventeen states, 398 hospitalized, two dead. Michigan by itself reports 13,909 cases — more than the federal government counts for the entire seventeen-state outbreak. We have five cases filed against Taco Bell, four different franchise operators and Taylor Farms, and more than two hundred other people in twenty-six states have retained us to find out how they were poisoned. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa — 431 sick in 32 states, Chipotle and QDOBA — which Minnesota epidemiologists and a company traceback found before it ever reached FDA’s outbreak table; a month later the grower still has not been named and the recall of what it sold has spread to more than 160 grocery products. Infant botulism litigation against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria out of Boar’s Head. E. coli O157:H7 from beef kofta and from romaine. Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs and from a Lexington pie shop. E. coli O145 in frozen blueberries. Vibrio from raw seafood in Queens. Read a month of marlerblog.com. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.

Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. You will read FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, USDA establishment records, whole genome sequencing and PulseNet clusters, epidemic curves built by state health departments, and — this summer — the sanitation and rainfall records of a Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown and the traceback on a lot of peppers out of Sinaloa. That work gets done before the complaint is filed, not in discovery. You will also have the Outbreak Database, which this office built and still maintains — decades of outbreaks, searchable, and no other firm in the country has it. Spanish is a real plus.

And half of this job is not litigation at all. E. coli O157:H7 became an adulterant in American beef in 1994; six more strains followed because we petitioned USDA to make them so. We helped pass FSMA in 2011, petitioned — so far without success — to have outbreak strains of Salmonella declared adulterants in 2019, and pushed hepatitis A vaccination for food workers in 2020. This year alone: an infant formula bill in the House, a food safety bill in the Senate, the Stop Foodborne Illness petition pending at FDA asking it to tell the public where recalled food went, comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028, and a standing demand that CDC count Cyclospora again. I publish Food Safety News, I have written over 6,000 posts on Marler Blog since 2004, I speak all over the world, and I teach food safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. You will do this too — including writing here under your own name, where reporters will read it. Within a few years it will be you the conference invites, the health department calls and the reporter quotes; our lawyers speak to industry groups, public health audiences and university classes, and that platform is handed over, not loaned. Work out of this office has been cited in more than a thousand media reports. We also correct in public: when a poultry veterinarian wrote in last month to tell me a post of mine was wrong, we ran the correction louder than the original. Being right matters less here than getting it right. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.

If you want to know what that adds up to, read the testimonials page on billmarler.com and pay attention to who is on it: a former FDA food safety czar, a former USDA food safety official, the retired head of the Produce Marketing Association. Michael Pollan wrote that the federal watchdog on food safety is asleep at the switch and we are what is left. One of the lawyers who defended the other side in the Jack in the Box cases became my law partner. You will spend your career arguing with the food industry, and some of the people you argue with will end up thanking you for it.

We are looking for an associate with at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal, or complex tort — who is ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them: you will carry your own docket from the start.

Here is what you will not do here. There is no billable hour requirement and no origination credit to chase — the clients find us, and the firm carries the cost of every case out of its own pocket until it resolves. There is no committee, no partner standing between you and the person who decides, and no waiting your turn: when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And there is no volume. We turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and the honest truth is that we want you here — living on the island, not commuting to it. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from downtown Seattle, in a town where you can walk to work, walk to lunch, and walk home. Most people who make the move do not move back. But the right lawyer matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound, or willing to relocate, and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help the right person get here. 

What you’ll actually do: file in federal and state courts across the country, write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases before anyone sees a courtroom — the medical chronology, the liability analysis, the damages model, all of it yours — take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists, work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis cases with the best experts in the field, sit with families in hospital rooms, and try cases. The docket is national; you will be on airplanes. It has been international as well — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa. You will be trusted early and often.

Many of our clients are children, and on those cases the last thing you do is the hardest. A settlement for a child has to be approved by a judge, cleared of Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA and sometimes federal military liens, and structured — now and then into a special needs trust — so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak took finally has to be replaced. If you have never done a minor’s compromise, you will.

What you need: licensed and in good standing somewhere, admissible pro hac vice everywhere else — Washington admission is not required; real deposition experience; the writing chops to draft a complaint that reporters quote; and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus, not a requirement — we’ll teach you the microbiology.

What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; bar dues and CLE; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, the Netflix documentary about this work — watch it before you apply. Also: a commute that involves a ferry or no ferry at all, and a firm that goes home for a safer dinner because of you.

One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area. Everyone here can name the child whose case they will never forget. That is why they stay. A client wrote to us that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after; that somebody is going to be you as often as it is me. I am not looking for a lawyer who wants a job. I am looking for one who cannot look away from it and wants to spend the next thirty years making a difference.

The job is open now. Resume, writing sample and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. The rest of it is public too: marlerclark.com and billmarler.com. No recruiters. Equal

Equal opportunity employer.

Saturday, September 5, 2026

This is the ninth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline The Federal CyclosporaOutbreak Added 528 People, 41 Hospitalizations and Three New States on the Last Thursday of the Season, and it closed on a prediction: the season CDC defines would end Monday, and nothing else would. That held. The season closed August 31 and the national count went up 1,265 the next morning. What changed this week is who is holding the paper. In three outbreaks a regulator asked for a recall, or the evidence plainly called for one, and none came: a San Diego County egg farm whose barns carry the outbreak strain, an Idaho sprouter on its third outbreak in fifteen years, and a seed supplier that has not answered FDA’s recall recommendation at all. Then on Thursday CDC said it would stop updating the largest outbreak of the year every week. The recall became optional and the count became occasional, in the same seven days.

On Friday afternoon San Diego County said the thing it had been unable to say since July 28. FDA sampled the hen houses at Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens in Ramona beginning August 17 — floors, perch rails, nest boxes — and Salmonella was found in two of seven houses. Genetic testing linked it to the strains from the sick. The outbreak stands at 23 cases and seven hospitalizations, and for the first time the County said where they live: La Mesa, Del Mar, Ramona, Jamul, and one in Riverside County. Eighteen ate the raw-egg mayonnaise at Ramona Family Naturals Market; five got sick from the eggs themselves. The California Department of Public Health gave the results to the owners and recommended a voluntary recall. As of Friday the farm had not issued one, and results on the eggs are still pending. In December the same two state agencies got a genetic match at Vega Farms, the firm recalled, and CDPH published a warning with the handler code and Julian dates on it. Here the farm announced FDA’s two positives itself, on Instagram, before any agency had said a word. I wrote it up Friday night: the epidemiology already linked those people to those eggs, and a genetic match is the point at which a recall stops being a judgment call.

Sixteen people in Washington, Montana and Idaho are sick from broccoli sprouts, and nobody has recalled them. Washington’s Department of Health posted the outbreak Wednesday: thirteen Washington residents in seven counties, two hospitalized, onsets July 7 to August 18, plus two in Montana and one in Idaho, all Salmonella Bovismorbificans, all pointing at broccoli sprouts from Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho. Montana followed Thursday. Both states say do not eat them and told retailers not to sell them. There is no recall, and as of Friday neither FDA nor CDC had posted a line. This is the company’s third outbreak since 2011 — 25 sick with Salmonella in 2011, when it declined to recall until FDA issued a public warning of its own, and 19 with E. coli O121 in 2014 — roughly sixty people over fifteen years from one sprouter that is still shipping.

The alfalfa seed behind the Minnesota outbreak went to at least two sprouters, and the supplier has not answered FDA. FDA’s August 31 update says the Everything Sprouts alfalfa does not explain all 55 illnesses, that traceback found at least one more grower using the same seed lot from a common supplier, and that FDA recommended the supplier recall the lot and tell its customers to recall what they grew from it. The supplier has not responded, has sent no recall notice, and has instructed nobody. Neither the supplier nor the second grower is named. The count holds at 55 in fifteen states, four hospitalized, and on August 28 the recall grew a fourth product, Robust Radish mix in four lots that shipped through August 26, four days after the alfalfa came off the shelf. I wrote Monday that FDA has held mandatory recall authority over that seed lot since 2011. A recommendation that goes unanswered is the case for using it.

The season closed Monday, the count rose Tuesday, and on Thursday CDC said the weekly updates would stop. CDC’s national page moved September 1 to 18,445 confirmed cases, 990 hospitalizations and two deaths in 49 states and the District of Columbia — up 1,265 confirmed and 68 hospitalizations in a week, with Hawaii joining the map and 13,505 more cases CDC says it is aware of and has not confirmed. Last year’s May-to-August total was 1,180. The federal outbreak page stayed at 11,458 sick, 495 hospitalized, two dead and twenty states, the August 27 numbers, and on Thursday CDC added a line saying it is reducing the frequency of updates as new reports decline. Michigan is at 14,718. Indiana closed its count Wednesday at 2,104. Only thirteen of the forty-one states that ever published a number still maintain a page, and the fifty-state floor is 33,525, nearly three times what the federal outbreak attributes to the lettuce. Nearly 7,000 confirmed illnesses have no source on any page. Shoppers have noticed: the salad aisle is down double digits and July brought the largest one-month lettuce price drop on record.

The research that would explain the parasite is being shut down while the parasite is still moving. Politico reported, and Reuters carried it Sunday, that two of USDA’s three Cyclospora research projects at Beltsville were not funded in this year’s agriculture appropriations and are closed, and the third moves to Iowa this fall without one of its scientists agreeing to go. USDA’s spokesperson said none of the research is disrupted. I said what I thought of that Sunday.

The egg outbreak that took seven months to find is over at 134. CDC closed the Midwest Poultry Services investigation Thursday: 134 sick in eighteen states, 34 hospitalized, no deaths, onsets from November 21, 2025 to August 12, 2026 — three weeks past the July 22 recall of more than 1.5 million dozen eggs. Eighty-five percent of those interviewed ate eggs. FDA’s advisory for the same outbreak still reads July 24 and 98 cases, and its investigation table still carries the file as ongoing. Across the Atlantic the UK’s imported-egg outbreak is at 528 confirmed and two deaths as of September 1, 67 admitted to hospital, and still no importer, no country of origin and no recall named.

The frozen blueberry outbreak added five people and a Walmart lot. CDC’s Thursday update puts the E. coli O145:H28 outbreak from Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur of San Carlos, Chile, at 17 sick — thirteen in Florida, four in Georgia — six hospitalized, onsets May 11 to August 2. On Wednesday the firm expanded the recall to one lot of Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend sold at Walmart stores in sixteen states, with a best-by date in February 2028. FDA never walked the Chilean plant; it did a remote assessment and put the firm on an import alert. The map and the epi curve are here.

Three smaller files moved, and one of them got no headline at all. CDC’s hepatitis A outbreak from La Serranita frozen conchas negras now stands at 37 sick in four states, thirty of them hospitalized — an eighty-one percent hospitalization rate on an imported frozen clam that dealers in New Jersey and New York have recalled. In Washington, four E. coli cases with onsets in late May and early June trace to raw milk from Dungeness Valley Creamery in Sequim, the dairy’s fourth outbreak since 2009; a June sample came back negative, so there was no recall and no press release either. And in northern Utah the Bear River Health Department has 21 confirmed cases of Salmonella in Cache and Box Elder counties with no source, no serotype and no date range published, in a district that averages about 35 cases a year.

The file with no food named grew again. FDA’s investigation table was updated Wednesday: the Salmonella Newport file posted August 26 went from 84 to 97 cases with traceback only and no food, and the Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- file went from 41 to 43. CDC’s dashboard was working 40 multistate investigations as of Wednesday — 24 Salmonella, seven E. coli, seven Listeria, two Campylobacter — none with a product named, and USDA’s table lists nothing open at all. I put the three pages side by side Wednesday night. The empty USDA page is what continuous inspection of beef bought, and it is the page the proposal below would refill.

The recall ledger, with Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert keeping it as she does every week. Beyond the radish mix and the Walmart berries: Panorama Produce of Mamaroneck, New York, recalled 302 boxes of Martina-brand mangoes from Mexico sold at Walmart stores in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania after FDA found Salmonella in mangoes from the same farm; Northwest Naturals of Portland recalled raw chicken cat food and dog food that tested positive for Salmonella and Listeria; and on Friday Foods Alive of Angola, Indiana, recalled organic moringa leaf powder shipped nationwide from January 27 to August 7 after its supplier found Salmonella in a retail sample — the third recall this summer to trace to the same moringa ingredient, no illnesses reported, no supplier named. Her ledger is here, and it was the first place I saw the Evergreen story treated as what it is: a second sprout outbreak running alongside the first.

The proposal to let beef bypass inspection got a Monday follow-up that did not mention inspection. The President wrote on August 28 that he was authorizing documents to let farmers and ranchers process their own food, and the Secretary of Agriculture answered that she was on it. Her Monday announcement was an insurance endorsement, a loan program and a procurement preference — nothing about the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which is a statute, and nothing about custom-exempt slaughter. Representative Massie says it takes a bill, not an order; the Meat Institute and the cattlemen came out against weakening inspection. I explained last Friday what continuous inspection did to my hamburger practice, and I would rather it stay explained.

The formula botulism outbreaks got a report this week, and the report got no rule. The Reagan-Udall Foundation published a 44-page report from a July roundtable paid for by ByHeart and the International Dairy Foods Association: 22 recommendations, all voluntary, and not one parent among the 24 contributors. It landed a week after ByHeart said FDA had no further questions about its root-cause submission, a document nobody outside the company and the agency has read. Fifty-two babies were hospitalized across the two brands, and the testing rule still names Salmonella and Cronobacter and not the organism that paralyzed them. Here is what I would do with the report. The t-shirts go to every member of Congress this month.

Peter Barton Hutt died Wednesday at 91. He was FDA’s chief counsel from 1971 to 1975, the lawyer who persuaded the agency it could write binding regulations, a Covington partner for nearly five decades, co-author of the casebook, and a Harvard Law teacher for thirty years. I spent a career across the table from his work and never doubted he knew the statute better than anyone in the room. I wrote about him Friday. Two more items, compressed: Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic read the FRESH Act’s preemption clause line by line and found it reaches state pathogen standards, restaurant inspection and the right to sue; and on Tuesday the firm files three complaints in San Diego Superior Court for people sickened in the Ramona outbreak, one amended to carry Friday’s genetic match and two new. We are still hiring; the ad from two weeks ago stands, and bmarler@marlerclark.com is the address.

That’s the week — a genetic match in two of seven hen houses and an egg recall the state asked for and did not get, a sprouter on its third outbreak with sixteen sick and no recall, a seed supplier that has not answered FDA, a Cyclospora count that reached 18,445 the day after the season ended and a federal outbreak page that will now update when it updates, an egg outbreak closed at 134 seven months after it began, a 97-case Salmonella file with no food named, a formula report with 22 recommendations and no rule, and the passing of the man who wrote the food law the rest of us practice. The season is over on paper. Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.

Peter Barton Hutt died on Wednesday, September 2, 2026. He was 91. The Critical Path Institute, where he sat on the board, announced it the next day. The Personal Care Products Council called him the “Father of Modern Food and Drug Law,” which is less marketing copy than job description.

If you work anywhere near food safety in this country, you have spent your career standing on ground Peter graded, whether or not you knew his name.

A milk route into food and drug law

He grew up just north of Buffalo, New York, the son of a retail dairyman, and delivered milk on summer vacations. He went to Phillips Exeter, then Yale, then Harvard Law, then NYU for a master’s degree in food and drug law, spending a year reading English food law from Magna Carta forward. He landed at Covington & Burling in 1960 by knowing more than the interviewing partner did about federal milk marketing orders. Except for the four years in government, he stayed at that firm for the rest of his life, retiring in October 2024 as its first “Retired Partner in Residence” — and then showing up at the office five days a week anyway.

Four years that built the modern FDA

From 1971 to 1975, Peter was Chief Counsel of the Food and Drug Administration. Those four years did more to shape how our food is regulated than any four years since 1938.

His central move was legal and, to non-lawyers, invisible. He reinterpreted the informal rulemaking authority buried in the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to allow FDA to issue legally binding substantive regulations under the Administrative Procedure Act. Before that, FDA largely made policy one seizure at a time, in court, against one company. After it, FDA could write rules that governed the entire food supply. Every food regulation any of us has argued about since — preventive controls, produce safety, traceability — rests on the door he opened.

He then walked through it. Under Peter, FDA issued the regulations implementing the GRAS review of food ingredients, required nutrition labeling on half the food supply, redefined “imitation” food, modernized the food standards, and established emergency permit control for low-acid canned foods — the rules that sit between the canned goods aisle and botulism. He is the reason there is a nutrition label on the box, and his explanation never got more complicated than this: people ought to know what they are eating.

He also created the regulatory letter — what we now call the warning letter — as a cheap, fast alternative to litigation. On his way out, he wrote the procedural regulations that govern FDA administrative action. They still do.

His name is on the brief in United States v. Park

The piece of his work I reach for most often is United States v. Park, decided June 9, 1975, squarely inside his tenure. Acme Markets and its president, John R. Park, were charged under Section 301(k) with causing food held in Acme’s Baltimore warehouse to be exposed to rodent contamination. Acme pleaded guilty. Park went to trial, where he conceded that sanitary conditions were something he was responsible for in the entire operation of the company, and that it was one of the many phases he had assigned to dependable subordinates. The Fourth Circuit reversed his conviction and ordered a new trial, holding that the jury should have been instructed the government must prove wrongful action. The Supreme Court reversed that, 6 to 3, reaffirmed United States v. Dotterweich, and gave us the Park doctrine: a corporate officer who had the authority and responsibility to prevent or correct a violation can be convicted without proof of intent or personal participation.

The reporter’s note in the U.S. Reports records that Allan Abbott Tuttle argued the case for the United States and lists on the briefs with him Solicitor General Bork, Assistant Attorney General Kauper, Howard E. Shapiro — and Peter Barton Hutt. By his own account, he is the reason the Solicitor General agreed to defend FDA’s stringent criminal enforcement policy at the Court at all.

Notice what the case turned on. FDA had written Park in April 1970 about insanitary conditions at Acme’s Philadelphia warehouse; a year later inspectors found the same thing in Baltimore. That letter came in over objection, and the Fourth Circuit had called admitting it reversible error; the Supreme Court held it was proper rebuttal to Park’s defense that he had justifiably relied on subordinates. The letter predates Peter’s arrival at FDA, but the instrument and the doctrine fit together, and he is the one who made that instrument standard practice. The warning letter is what forecloses the delegation defense later.

One more thing about that brief. The amici urging the Court to side with Park included the National Association of Food Chains, the National Canners Association, and the Grocery Manufacturers of America. Peter was on the brief against all three and then spent the next forty-nine years representing the industries those groups spoke for. Park is the tool I keep asking the Justice Department to pick back up. He is a large part of the reason it is still sitting there to be picked up.

The teacher

Beginning in 1994, he taught the winter-term Food and Drug Law course at Harvard Law School — the whole history of government regulation of food and drugs, from antiquity to last week. He was still listed on the Harvard Law faculty as a Lecturer on Law for 2026-2027, with Food and Drug Law on the schedule for the spring term.

He was lead co-author of Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials, first edition 1980, fifth edition 2022. When he started that book, two law schools in the country taught the subject. He wrote it, he said, so the field would be taken seriously and taught everywhere. It worked. Nearly every food lawyer practicing today — on my side of the table and the other — learned from that casebook or from someone who did.

We were not on the same side, and he was still worth listening to

Peter spent most of his career representing the industries FDA regulates, including the national trade associations for food, drugs, supplements, and cosmetics. I have spent mine representing the people those industries sickened. We were opponents by definition.

He was also willing to say things his clients did not enjoy hearing. In a keynote at a Harvard conference in February 2014, he called the Food Safety Modernization Act “poorly drafted and poorly conceived,” written like a regulation instead of a statute and pointed out that the 1938 Act covered all food in four of its nineteen pages while FSMA spent 88 on food safety alone. His bottom line was that the statute was neither necessary nor desirable: after the Second Circuit’s 1977 Nova Scotia decision, he argued, FDA already had the authority to write those rules itself, and the two together left it the most powerful agency in the federal government. He also predicted implementation would take ten years at best and could take twenty-five.

His long-running argument was that FDA needed money more than it needed new statutes. He sat on the FDA Science Board subcommittee whose analysis, by his account, helped push Congress to roughly double the agency’s appropriation between 2008 and 2013.

FDA had that authority for thirty-four years after Nova Scotia and did not write preventive controls, and the people I represent are the reason we stopped waiting. On the money he was right, and it has aged well. Watching FSMA’s traceability rule get delayed and its enforcement starved this year, I keep coming back to his point: an agency handed enormous power, and no resources is a promise nobody intends to keep.

Hong Kong, 2014

A dozen years ago, Peter and I shared a stage – I admit I was a bit star struck. In June 2014 we were both speakers at the First International Conference on Food Safety at the University of Hong Kong, June 16 to 18 — a meeting on global food safety, international harmonization, and the farm-to-table chain. The speaker list ran from Peking University to the Korea Food Research Institute to the Max Rubner Institut and included a former Chief Counsel of the FDA and a plaintiffs’ lawyer from Bainbridge Island.

We came at that audience from opposite ends of the same problem — he from the statute and the rulemaking record, me from the hospital charts and the depositions. What stayed with me is that he never treated the other side of the room as an inconvenience. He wanted the argument. He was also, at 79, the best-prepared person in the building.

The objection was there on day one

His industry ties were a scandal before he had unpacked his office. On September 17, 1971, about a week after he started, the Michigan Daily ran an editorial calling his appointment one of the clearest examples of industry influence on FDA. He had come to the job representing the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils. His predecessor as chief counsel, William W. Goodrich, had left to become president of that same trade association. Representative Benjamin Rosenthal called it a game of musical chairs and predicted Hutt would have to disqualify himself from three-quarters of the cases coming before the agency. The Senate Commerce consumer affairs subcommittee held a hearing on the appointment that day; because the chief counsel job needed no Senate confirmation, asking questions was all Congress could do.

The editorial’s specific fear is the part worth reading twice. FDA had finally begun moving on ingredient labeling for processed foods, and the paper predicted the industry’s man would tell the agency it lacked the legal authority to write such a rule.

However, he told the agency it had the authority — and used it to put nutrition labeling on half the food supply.

What he leaves

He testified before the House and Senate more than 100 times. Legal Times called him the dean of the food-and-drug bar; Chambers called him a legend. By his own account, he was in the mix to be FDA Commissioner three separate times and never got it — twice because Senator Kennedy would not let anyone who had represented the regulated industry through: in 2001 by refusing to hold a hearing, in 2005 by promising all-out opposition.

That was the objection for nearly fifty years. The man who wrote the rules that made the modern FDA possible was never allowed to run it, because he had spent his career on the industry side. I would still rather have had him in the building.

The food safety world is small. It has a handful of people who can tell you not just what a rule says but why it was written, who fought it, and what the agency gave up getting it. We are down one.

Rest well, Peter.  Condolences to his wife, family and friends.

I have spent more than 30 years suing food companies that poisoned people. I have said, more times than I can count, that my goal is to be put out of business by an industry that stops making people sick. So, when Joelle Mosso — Associate Vice President of Science Programs at Western Growers, and one of the sharpest scientific minds working in produce safety — writes a piece asking, “What if prevention actually paid?”, I pay attention.

Her August 31 post, “The Food Safety Fast Pass: What If Prevention Actually Paid?”, makes an argument that I think is fundamentally correct: our system is built almost entirely on penalties, while the economic rewards still flow to whoever produces food fastest and cheapest. The company that invests in agricultural water monitoring, environmental surveillance, real traceability, and transparent data sharing bears the full cost of those investments — while the benefits accrue to public health and to the food system as a whole. Meanwhile, the company that cuts corners undercuts them on price at the buyer’s desk.

She’s right. That is a broken incentive structure, and I have watched it play out in my law practice for three decades. The companies I sue are rarely the ones that spent too much on food safety.

Her proposal — preferential access to market development programs, reduced crop insurance costs, infrastructure grants, and a verified “green lane” for importers with years of demonstrated preventive controls — deserves serious consideration. And her most important insight is one that too many people in industry and government still get wrong: the metric cannot be “no positives.” A system that rewards clean test results rewards companies for not testing. The safest operation is not the one that never finds a problem. It’s the one that looks hard enough to find problems early and knows what to do when it does. I have deposed enough executives to tell you that “we never had a positive” usually means “we never looked.”

So, consider this a genuine endorsement of the idea. Now let me offer a few caveats from the plaintiff’s side of the courtroom.

First, who verifies? Any fast-pass system is only as good as the auditing behind it, and the food industry’s track record with third-party audits is, to put it charitably, mixed. Peanut Corporation of America had a “superior” audit rating while it was shipping Salmonella-laced peanut paste that killed nine people. Jensen Farms got a 96 out of 100 days before its cantaloupes killed 33 people with Listeria. If the “exceptional, sustained risk management” that earns a company its green lane is documented by an auditor the company itself hires and pays, we will have built a faster lane to the same courthouse. Verification has to be independent, data-driven, and continuous — which, to her credit, is exactly the kind of ongoing data sharing Mosso describes. The details will matter enormously.

Second, the stick cannot atrophy while we build the carrot. Mosso is explicit that this is not deregulation, and I believe she means it. But I have watched too many “risk-based” proposals get repurposed in Washington as cover for cutting inspection budgets. FDA and USDA are already stretched thin. A green lane that lets regulators concentrate resources on the riskiest suppliers only works if those resources actually exist and actually get concentrated — not quietly eliminated in the next appropriations cycle. If “fewer routine inspections for good actors” becomes “fewer inspections, period,” consumers lose and the fast pass becomes a fig leaf.

Third, benefits must be revocable — fast. Any company enjoying expedited entry or reduced oversight needs to know that the moment its data goes dark, its testing frequency drops, or its traceability degrades, the pass is gone. The privilege has to be easier to lose than it was to earn. Otherwise, we’ve created a class of companies that are politically difficult to police.

Fourth, don’t forget the small guys. The growers who most need help paying for water treatment systems and surveillance infrastructure are often the ones least able to navigate a federal incentive program. If the fast pass ends up as one more advantage for the largest, best-lawyered operations, we will have made the market less fair without making the food much safer. The shared infrastructure grants Mosso mentions — like cooperative agricultural water monitoring — may be the most important piece of her whole proposal, precisely because they help the operations that can’t do it alone.

Here is the bottom line. For 30-plus years, I have been the most expensive food safety consultant in America — companies pay my clients tens of millions of dollars for lessons they could have learned for a fraction of the cost. Litigation is a blunt, slow, after-the-fact instrument. It compensates the injured, and it concentrates the minds of executives, but it arrives only after a child is on dialysis or a family is planning a funeral.

If Joelle Mosso’s fast pass — done honestly, verified independently, and backed by a regulatory system that keeps its teeth — moves investment in prevention upstream of the outbreak, then I am all for it. Make prevention pay. Make transparency a market advantage. Reward the companies that look for problems instead of the ones that look away.

And if it works, maybe it finally puts me out of business.

I’ve been waiting a long time.