A 1976 federal law requires herring boats to carry federal observers who collect the data needed to prevent overfishing. That was fine with fisherman Bill Bright - the monitors gave him valuable information. However, in 2020, a new interpretation of that law now required his company to pay for those observers, at a rate of $700 a day. He did the math. In a good week at sea, he said, “we might catch $100,000 worth of herring, which would make us happy.” The monitor’s fee would add up to 5 percent of that, about the same as the $5,000 shares claimed by each of the crew’s four members, who can spend weeks without pay preparing for a voyage. He added that not every week at sea is a good week. “That tax,” he said, referring to the monitor’s fee, “is going to be very burdensome to a business that’s very burdened in the beginning with all the high fuel costs, all of our supplies, our nets, our gear.”
Mr. Bright, a fish supplier to Cape May’s Lund’s Fisheries, is backed by a conservative group with ambitions that extend far beyond fishing regulations. Its aim is to do away with a seminal 1984 decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most cited cases in American law. On June 28, 2024, they did just that. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Bright, and issued a landmark decision that overturned the Chevron doctrine and the forty-year-old practice of deferring to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous federal laws.
This story was assigned and published by The New York Times as well as Bloomberg in September and October 2023.
