PORTSMOUTH, NH (February 12, 2009) — Underlying the tension that pervaded this week’s meeting of the region’s fishing interests, their representatives on a government council and the chief regulator of all fishing in New England was a clash of how to interpret the nation’s fishing law.
As such, if there is to be a once-and-for-all resolution, it will likely come from the courts, which have already been drawn into the dispute over the ultimate mandate in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. In a preliminary ruling last month, a federal judge in Boston sided with the fishing interests, but it did little more than but roil the sides and send them into head-scratching confusion. Read the Gloucester Daily Times story in full