Saving Seafood

Fishing monitor litigation continues with new appeal

September 8, 2025 — The legal fight over on-board fishing monitors, which sparked the demise of a decades-old legal theory last year, is continuing on in federal appeals court.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is appealing a decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, which found this summer — for a second time — that commercial fishing boat owners have to pay for monitors on their vessels to prevent over-fishing.

The district court ruling in the Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce case came after the fishing industry, represented by the NCLA, successfully argued before the Supreme Court that courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ reading of ambiguous laws under what is known as Chevron deference.

Read the full article at E&E News

Despite commercial fishers’ US Supreme Court victory, district court upholds at-sea observers rule

July 22, 2o25 — A U.S. District Court has upheld a rule requiring commercial fishers to pay for at-sea monitors, despite the case playing a role in the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Chevron deference last year.

The Chevron deference is a longstanding judicial precedent that instructed courts to give federal agencies wide latitude in interpreting the laws passed by Congress. While the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two separate lawsuits brought by commercial fishermen in overturning the Chevron deference, the lower U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island has determined that the fishing regulation at the heart of one of those cases will remain in place.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Court upholds rule requiring fishing boat owners to pay regulators

July 18, 2025 — A federal court has upheld the government’s ability to require commercial fishing boat owners to pay for monitors aboard their vessels, a year after the Supreme Court took up the case and broadly curbed federal agencies’ authority.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled Tuesday that a NOAA Fisheries rule was lawful under the primary U.S. fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA).

Senior Judge William Smith said the court must exercise its independent judgment on whether an agency acted within its authority.

Read the full article at E&E News

Fishermen’s Case That Overturned Chevron Sees Agency Rule Upheld

July 17, 2025 — Atlantic herring fishermen failed to overturn a National Marine Fisheries Service rule requiring vessels to pay onboard compliance monitors’ costs in a case that joined Loper Bright v. Raimondo in rolling back agency deference at the US Supreme Court.

The US District Court for the District of Rhode Island upheld the agency’s interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act’s vessel observer requirements on Tuesday, offering an early indication of how much courts may exercise independent judgment in determining if the government conducted “reasoned decisionmaking.”

“Congress explicitly delegated discretionary authority,” to the NMFS to issue rules that the agency deems “necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of the fishery,” and Judge William E. Smith ruled industry-funded monitoring fits within those parameters.

The Supreme Court included a discretionary delegation caveat in the Loper Bright decision last June, which overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine requiring courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The cases were remanded to their respective appeals courts, and the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit sent this case back to district court.

Read the full article at Bloomberg Law

Why the Fishing Industry Fought: Inside the Battle Over Chevron

May 2, 2025 — Wayne Reichle – who’s been in the fishing business his whole life – had never heard of the Chevron doctrine. That’s the two-step legal test that courts used for the past 40 years to decide whether a federal agency had the authority to make a regulation.

“No idea,” said Reichle, president of New Jersey-based Lund’s Fisheries. “Myself, and many, many fellow fishermen had no idea what the Chevron doctrine was.”

That changed after a group of fishermen challenged a federal regulation requiring the herring industry to pay for onboard federal observers. “I think there’s quite a few that know what the Chevron doctrine is today,” Reichle said.

This season on UnCommon Law, we’re exploring the limits of agency power. To what extent are federal agencies authorized to create and implement regulations that aren’t explicitly mandated by Congress? And what happens when an agency goes too far? In this episode, the story of the fishermen who fought back.

Listen to the full story at Bloomberg Law

US seafood industry set for spike in court battles in the wake of Chevron’s overturning

March 19, 2025 — Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Chevron deference – a legal precedent stemming from the 1980s that gave federal agencies wide latitude in interpreting congressional statutes.

That move, according to Robert Smith, a partner at Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based law firm K&L Gates, could turn the U.S. seafood industry into a more litigious environment in the near future.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

DC Circuit tests Chevron’s impact in fisheries case

November 6, 2024 — The demise of the Chevron doctrine may not spell automatic doom for the federal fisheries rule that was at the center of the Supreme Court case that ended 40 years of precedent on agency deference.

During oral arguments Monday, judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — who in 2022 upheld the NOAA Fisheries regulation on Chevron grounds — appeared to think that there is still statutory support to affirm requirements for herring vessels to pay the salaries of third-party onboard monitors.

The case, Loper Bright v. Raimondo, is back before the D.C. Circuit after the Supreme Court decided in June to overturn Chevron, which since 1984 had instructed federal judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. But the justices did not decide the fate of the NOAA Fisheries rule at the heart of the case.

Read the full article at E&E News

Court open to upholding US fishing monitor rule even without ‘Chevron’ doctrine

November 5, 2024 — A U.S. appeals court on Monday appeared open to upholding a federal rule requiring commercial fishermen to fund a program to monitor for overfishing of herring off New England’s coast even after the U.S. Supreme Court in that same case issued a landmark ruling curbing agencies’ regulatory power.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, during oral arguments, weighed the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision to scrap a 40-year-old legal doctrine that had required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws they administer.

The 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court nixed the doctrine, known as “Chevron deference,” after taking up an appeal by several commercial fishing companies of the D.C. Circuit panel’s 2-1 ruling in August 2022 that had relied on the doctrine to uphold the fishing rule.

The justices sent the case back to the D.C. Circuit to reassess the rule’s validity post-Chevron using their own judgment and for further arguments by the fishing companies, led by New Jersey-based Loper Bright Enterprises.

Read the full article at Reuters

‘A post-Chevron world’: DC Circuit wrestles with agency authority in fishing boat spat

November 5, 2024 — A D.C. Circuit panel grappled Monday with the fallout from the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a longstanding legal doctrine which allowed federal judges to defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a challenged statue.

The high court ruled 6-3 in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the doctrine, known as Chevron deference, should be overturned and that federal judges themselves should instead “exercise their independent judgment” when an agency oversteps its authority.

That case was originally argued before the D.C. Circuit in 2021, the appellate circuit that deals the most with challenges against federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and, in this case, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

In its decision to overturn Chevron, the high court remanded the case to the three-judge panel to reassess claims by a coalition of fishing companies that the government was wrong to require they pay the wages of independent “at-sea monitors.”

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

DOJ argues federal law allows NOAA to charge fishermen for monitors

September 19, 2024 — Out-of-pocket payments made by fishermen to federal monitors who accompany them at sea is comparable to the costs fishermen incur when they purchase new gear or equipment to comply with any other other regulations, government lawyers argue in a legal brief filed Wednesday in federal appeals court.

The brief in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, is the government’s latest volley in what has become a landmark case pitting NOAA Fisheries against a group of New Jersey herring fishermen after the Supreme Court in June rolled back a long-standing legal doctrine that gave deference to agencies like NOAA in disputes over a regulation’s interpretation.

The filing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit argues that all NOAA Fisheries regulations require industry compliance and that sometimes compliance “imposes economic costs on vessels.”

Read the full article at E&E News