The Little-Known Rule Change That Made the Supreme Court So Powerful

One must feel for the fishermen of Cape May, New Jersey. They had a fair grievance and took it to court—all the way to the Supreme Court. But along that journey their lawsuit became something else: a way to possibly remake administrative law. They just want to make a living catching herring, but the justices are more interested in using their case to weigh in on a different legal question entirely.

This is the story of , one of the blockbuster cases on the Court’s docket this year. The case involves a federal law requiring fishermen to “carry” government inspectors as observers on their fishing boats in order to monitor compliance with a federal agency’s rules. That regulator—the National Marine Fisheries Service—recently interpreted to mean “pay for” and began charging fishermen roughly 20 percent of their revenue todoctrine, the court was obligated to defer to agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of “ambiguous” statutes.