Underscoring and expanding on arguments made by fishing industry plaintiffs, two congressmen and a consumer advocacy group are pressing the case that the government ignored a statutory requirement for a participants' referendum to create a limited-access groundfishery that is driving out the weak and enriching the powerful among fishing boats and businesses.
The amicus briefs of Congressmen Barney Frank and John Tierney — written and filed by Eldon C.V. Greenberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and former chief counsel at NOAA, the defendant agency — and briefs from Food & Water Watch, were filed Tuesday and Wednesday with the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
The Court of Appeals has been asked to vacate a federal judge's ruling last summer upholding Amendment 16, the radical reorganization of the New England groundfishery into a catch share system that functions as a commodities market, with participants allocated tradeable "shares" of a government-limited catch.
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