Opinion ID: 2321422
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Public's Common Law Right to Use the Intertidal Land is Limited to Fishing, Fowling, and Navigation

Text: [¶ 60] In Bell II, the Court's majority surveyed more than one and one-half centuries of Maine decisions regarding the public's right to use the intertidal land and concluded that the public has no common law right to engage in general recreation. 557 A.2d at 173, 176. That decision recognized that the public's rights in this sphere have never been divorced from the three public uses reserved in the Colonial Ordinancefishing, fowling, and navigation: The Colonial Ordinance as received into the common law of Maine and Massachusetts reserved out of the fee title granted to the upland owner a public easement only for fishing, fowling, and navigation. Id. at 173. [¶ 61] Bell II did not treat the terms fishing, fowling, and navigation as shorthand or code for broader public trust rights untethered to these three enumerated uses. The Bell II majority opinion explained: We have held that the public may fish, fowl, or navigate on the privately owned land for pleasure as well as for business or sustenance, Barrows v. McDermott , 73 Me. [441, 449 (1882)]; and we have in other ways given a sympathetically generous interpretation to what is encompassed within the terms fishing, fowling, and navigation, or reasonably incidental or related thereto. For example, the operator of a power boat for hire may pick up and land his passengers on the intertidal land, Andrews v. King, 124 Me. 361, 129 A. 298 (1925); and navigation also includes the right to travel over frozen waters, French v. Camp, 18 Me. 433 (1841), to moor vessels and discharge and take on cargo on intertidal land, State v. Wilson , 42 Me. [9, 24 (1856)]; and, after landing, to pass freely to the lands and houses of others besides the owners of the flats, Deering v. Proprietors of Long Wharf, 25 Me. 51, 65 (1845). Similarly, we have broadly construed fishing to include digging for worms, State v. Lemar, 147 Me. 405, 87 A.2d 886 (1952), clams, State v. Leavitt, 105 Me. 76, 72 A. 875 (1909), and shellfish, Moulton v. Libbey, 37 Me. 472 (1854). We have never, however, decided a question of the scope of the intertidal public easement except by referring to the three specific public uses reserved in the Ordinance. The terms fishing, fowling, and navigation, liberally interpreted, delimit the public's right to use this privately owned land. 557 A.2d at 173 (footnote omitted). [¶ 62] To delimit means to fix or determine the limits of. Webster's Third New International Dictionary 597 (2002). It is true that we have historically applied what the concurrence alternately describes as an expansive, liberal, broad, and sympathetically generous approach to the public's right to use intertidal lands. Saufley Concurring Opinion ¶¶ 37, 39, 40, 41, 57. With that approach, we have, over time, greatly expanded the scope of the public that benefits from the right to fish, fowl, and navigate, and we have construed those terms far beyond their traditional meanings. We have never understood fishing, fowling, and navigation to merely establish a context for some broader right or rights. By asserting that fishing, fowling, and navigation do not wholly or exclusively define the public trust rights, Saufley Concurring Opinion ¶ 56, the concurrence proposes a holding that would fundamentally alter, rather than merely expand, Maine's existing common law.