Alliance Against IFQs v. Brown
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
84 F.3d 343 (1996)
To address overfishing, the Commerce Secretary (defendant) allocated fishing quota shares to boat owners and lessees active between 1988-1990, rather than to fishermen generally, reasoning that fishermen's individual shares were hard to determine and that owners/lessees had made capital investments; fishermen without boats and later-entering owners (plaintiffs) challenged the scheme as violating the statute's present-participation and fair-and-equitable requirements, and the district court granted summary judgment for the government.
Whether a regulatory scheme that inequitably allocates quotas among regulated parties is arbitrary or capricious if the regulating agency had a rational basis for the allocation.