July 24, 2024 — A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision could have important implications for fisheries in Alaska.
Last month, the Supreme Court overturned a legal principle called Chevron deference, named after the case that established it. For 40 years, that principle gave federal agencies wide authority to interpret the gray area in laws passed by Congress. Now, more of that authority will go to judges.
The decision came after a legal battle over who should pay for bycatch monitors on trawl boats. The potential effects extend to all federally regulated industries — including fisheries.
Many trawl boats are required to have bycatch observers onboard. And in Alaska, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council can have trawl boats pay for those observers. That’s the law. It’s spelled out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs commercial fishing.
But that act is not clear on who should pay for bycatch observers elsewhere. In the Atlantic, a federal agency created a similar funding program and a trawling business sued.
“And so (the National Marine Fisheries Service) used its agency authority to interpret the statute and fill in the gap and say, ‘Well, you know, we’re going to do what we do in the North Pacific region here in the Atlantic region.’ And the court said, ‘Nope, you can’t do that,’” said Anna Crary, an environmental lawyer at the firm Landye Bennett Blumstein LLP in Anchorage. She’s been watching that court case.
That Supreme Court decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, was a reversal of policy the Court formed in a 1984 environmental lawsuit called Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council.
That doctrine said that when federal laws are vague, federal agencies should fill in the gaps, and courts should defer to the expertise of those agencies. Crary said that understanding of agency power has become a baseline assumption.
“Administrative law, unbeknownst to many people, really forms the backbone of what we perceive as our everyday life, as modern society. But the extent to which this decision destabilizes that, I think is quite profound,” Crary said.