Law Commons^™

Fisheries Without Courts: How Fishery Management Reveals Our Dynamic Separation Of Powers, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This essay adds a perspective from fisheries governance to the broader inquiry into the respective roles of judicial, legislative, and executive decision-making in modern environmental law. It comments on Robin Craig and Catherine Danley’s quantitative assessment of litigation under the federal Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA), and considers three key questions raised by their research: (1) Why is the judicial role in fisheries management small in comparison to the executive role? (2) When litigation is brought, why are fishery management plans the most frequent targets of litigation? And finally, (3) why is it that even with so many fisheries …