New Fisheries Law Case from Ninth Circuit - Pacific Coast v. Banks

New case regarding the National Marine Fisheries Service plans for the Pacific groundfish fishery and trawler groundfishing regulations.  The case is Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association v. Banks.  Opinion can be found here.

The opinion is heavy on statute and regulation, particularly the National Environmental Policy Act, the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation Management Act and the Administrative Procedures Act, but the opinion is light on readability, so I will sum up:  old fishing regulations caused sub-optimal yields because regulations had to protect impacts on bycatch.  NMFS came up with a new approach that established quotas by sector of fishing community (trawl, non-trawl, shore). The court found that the federal government had wide discretion to parse the allocations and quotas among the fishing communities, even in seeming arbitrary fashion.