Over the past ten years, four successive administrations have taken turns enacting, revoking, and reimplementing an illegal fishing ban across a 5,000-square-mile swath of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2016, President Obama leaned on the Antiquities Act—a 1906 law enacted to protect ancient Pueblo ruins—to declare an expansive area near the Georges Bank a national monument and ban fishing across it. The first Trump administration rescinded the ban after taking office, then the Biden administration reestablished it in 2021. Now, after another reversal by the second Trump administration, private environmental organizations are petitioning the courts to force the ban back into law.
New England fishermen have paid the price for this seesawing abuse of power, with their lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance for a decade. When the ban is in effect, they can face criminal charges, jail time, the loss of their licenses, and astronomical fines—up to $100,000 per day—for fishing in waters that carry no penalties when the ban is rescinded.
Currently, the ban is not in effect. But a private environmental group’s lawsuit hopes to resurrect it and once again allow presidential decree to violate fishermen’s rights.
New Yorker Frank Green and Vermonter Bob Conrad refuse to let that abuse of power go unchallenged. They filed a federal lawsuit in 2024 to challenge President Biden’s reestablishment of the fishing ban, which was left pending after the ban’s reversal. Now, as the courts once again examine the meaning of the Antiquities Act and assess the limits of the president’s power, the fishermen are heading back to the courtroom as intervenors to defend the separation of powers and the rights of fishermen across the Atlantic.
Represented at no cost by Pacific Legal Foundation, Conrad and Green argue that the court should affirm the ban’s reversal because the Antiquities Act does not grant the president the authority to designate marine monuments or ban commercial fishing—making the initial ban illegal and unenforceable.
Their lawsuit joins Pacific Legal Foundation’s ongoing efforts to defend the right to productively use natural resources. Everyone benefits when the government steps back and allows Americans to combine environmental stewardship with the pursuit of human flourishing—rather than treating them as incompatible goals and writing that false dichotomy into law through sweeping bans.
What’s At Stake?
- When the government retracts prior abuses of power, those retractions must be upheld, not cited as reasons to rewrite the law and grant the president powers that Congress never authorized.
- Environmental stewardship and human flourishing are not competing goals, and the law should not force Americans to choose between them.
- Greenwashing an abuse of power doesn’t legitimize it. The government cannot use narrowly tailored laws to justify sweeping bans on the productive use of natural resources.
