A Lobserman Tending His Traps on the Coast of Maine.
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) today announced that it has retained former US Solicitor General Paul Clement and has filed for expedited consideration of MLA’s appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Maine Lobstermen’s Association v. National Marine Fisheries Service – its lawsuit to reverse a scientifically flawed federal whale plan that will cripple Maine’s lobster industry.
Clement, who served as US solicitor general during the President George W. Bush administration from 2004-2008, is widely recognized as a leading Supreme Court advocate, focusing on appellate matters, constitutional litigation, and strategic counseling. He has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court including several of the highest-profile cases of the past decade.
“When we said we refuse to let a single judge’s decision be the last word and that MLA is preparing to go all the way to the Supreme Court, we weren’t kidding,” said MLA president Kristan Porter, who is also a commercial fisherman from Cutler. “We are incredibly grateful that Paul Clement, arguably the most qualified attorney in the nation on these matters, has chosen to stand with us. Paul has looked at the facts and agrees with what we have been sayhing all along – National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) abused its discretion. Maine lobstermen are not driving the right whale toward extinction, but we are being punished by unsound federal rules that will wreck this industry, but won’t recover the whale.”
“This is a clear case of government overreach. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the Maine lobster fishery, a national icon, hangs in the balance,” said Paul Clement. “The applicable statute requires the agency to apply the best available evidence. The agency instead has resolved every doubt and every disputed issue against an iconic American industry that has gone to great lengths to protect the right whale. The agency is inflicting unprecedented hardship on Maine lobstermen, while explicitly acknowledging that all this suffering will do nothing to restore the right whale so long as they continue to die in Canada.”
“As the National Marine Fisheries Services pushes heedlesly ahead to implement new rules that would devastate Mdaine lobstermen, the Appeals Court must more just as fast to conider the available science and revere the lower court’s opinion to prevent further damage to the critical industry” said Governor Janet T. Mills (D). “My administratin will continue to fight to see that the court’s use sound science and proven facts. Most notably that a known right whale notably has never been attributyed to Maine lobster gear and that lobstermen have undertaken subsantial measures, at great personal expense, to protect them……………”
Governor Mills has also donates $100,000 from the Contingent Account to Lobstermen Association to support ongoing legal battles for the lobster industry.
In September 2021, MLA filed a lawsuidt challenging the federal government’s fundamentally flawed 10-year whale protection plan that will all but eliminate the Maine lobster fishery yet still fail to save the endangered North Atlantic right whale. On September 8, 2022, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled against MLA in an opinion that deferred to the federal agency on all counts without disputing the validity of MLA’s concerns.