The new law would result in a serious misdemeanor for a first offense and an aggravated misdemeanor for subsequent offenses, punishable by prison time and fees. A conspiracy charge also is possible.

James Gritzner, senior judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, invalidated the earlier law, ruling First Amendment concerns trumped lying to get a job.

“To some degree, the concept of constitutional protection for speech that is false may be disquieting,” he wrote, while citing a U.S. Supreme Court precedent that “the Nation well knows that one of the costs of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech we detest as well as the speech we embrace.”

He added that it protects false statements whether “investigative deceptions or innocuous lies.”

Although that bill and its latest incarnation were framed as improving biosecurity — diseases supposedly transmitted by trespass onto factory farms — Gritzner threw that contention under the bus.

“Defendants have made no record as to how biosecurity is threatened by a person making a false statement to get access to, or employment in, an agricultural production facility,” he wrote.