A U.S. Appeals Court has ruled against the Maine lobster industry in a lawsuit it brought against the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation (MBAF).
A coalition of Maine lobstermen, including Bean Maine Lobster Inc., the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, Atwood Lobster LLC, and Bug Catcher Inc., had won a lawsuit against the MBAF over its decision to give the fishery a “red” rating in its seafood watch list. The aquarium foundation appealed that lawsuit, and now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, remanding it with instructions to dismiss the complaint entirely.
The lawsuit has roots in a 2020 court case, when a judge found the U.S. lobster industry violated the Endangered Species Act, forcing NOAA to rewrite the regulations governing the industry. A follow-up case found those rules also failed to meet the requirements of the act, but action by the federal government prevented further harm to the industry.
Those rulings were all related to the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species with just a few hundred individuals remaining. The U.S. lobster industry has been linked to right whale deaths.
During that time, the MBAF downgraded the U.S. lobster fishery from yellow to red, also citing the danger to right whales in its decision that advises consumers to avoid the species when making seafood purchases. It said that bycatch management by the fishery didn’t go far enough to mitigate entanglement risks for whales and, therefore, recommended against buying Maine lobster.
The lobster industry said the downgrade “unfairly targeted” the sector, and its lawsuit against the aquarium alleged it “knowingly ignored and mischaracterized scientific data to convince the public that, despite their sustainable practices, Maine lobstermen are causing harm to endangered North Atlantic right whales.”
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) also said the listing adversely affected the industry.
“This decision led consumers to believe the Aquarium’s false narrative that Maine lobstermen do not use sustainable fishing practices and resulted in a loss of customers for Maine lobster, including Whole Foods, which announced in November 2022 that it would stop buying Maine lobster,” the MLA said.
While initially just a lawsuit over the MBAF’s listing, after the aquarium appealed the case, it rapidly took on wider significance as a debate over First Amendment rights. Multiple major media companies, including The New York Times, ProPublica, USA Today, and the Atlantic, all entered the case to back the aquarium on the grounds that the lawsuit could impact press freedom and weaken First Amendment protections for the press.
“This libel suit raises serious concerns about the press’s ability to report news and analysis, including on complex policy topics, without the threat of crippling libel suits,” the publications wrote in a brief submitted to the court. “The undersigned newsrooms and media organizations submit this brief … because the district court’s analysis on two foundational issues of defamation law threatens to weaken key protections for journalists to do their jobs.”
The argument was that a case found in favor of the lobster industry could weaken protections journalists have when they criticize entire industries.
The appeals court ruling ultimately decided that the lobster industry’s lawsuit was invalid, as the MBAF’s statements “are not actionable” under current group defamation rules. Under current precedent, statements made about a generalized group are protected speech – meaning the aquarium’s criticisms of the lobster industry as a whole are not actionable.
The lobster industry argued that the nature of the MBAF’s statements against the industry, which claimed the type of fishing gear used by the sector endangered the North Atlantic right whale, meant it applied to every member of the fishery.
“Thus, they contend, the statements are materially different from the hyperbole usually lobbed at entire industries that are subject to critique, and for that reason, the district court was correct to permit their claims to proceed,” the appeals court wrote.
The appeals court disagreed with that assertion, pointing out some of the entities involved in the lawsuit – like Bean Maine Lobster – are only involved in “downstream” parts of the industry, marketing and selling lobster but not catching it.
“Regardless, the plaintiffs have not cited, and we have been unable to find, any case applying the particular-reference exception that allowed a claim against a large group to proceed on the theory that the challenged statements arguably applied to each member of the large group,” the court wrote. “In essence, then, the plaintiffs ask us to expand the rationale of the small-group exception to cover groups of any size, so long as the statement encompasses all members of the group. We are not persuaded by the plaintiffs' arguments.”
