Court Opinion

ID: 9652412
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:23:29.636657+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:51.155522
License: Public Domain

MACK, Associate Judge, Retired,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. What case law there is in this jurisdiction is outdated, conflicting, and not very helpful in analyzing this case. (It is interesting to note that a Virginia court denied a preliminary injunction.) The very nature of the business — petitioning the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, with respect to food labeling, connotes a vital public interest best served by free competition. The federal court did not find a federal question but I note this company had been dealing with the Department of Agriculture for thirty years. As many as 12,000 of the 15,000 potential customers in this field may be current or former clients of this company. The scope of the prohibition, barring Mr. Ellis from engaging in his profession, is in my view unreasonable. Perhaps a more appropriate restriction might have been to bar Ellis from soliciting ally of those clients whose accounts he personally handled. By contrast, the harm to the company is that of losing business; in the event that it would ultimately prevail it could be made whole by seeking money damages. I would reverse the grant of preliminary injunction.