A Wake County Superior Court judge has ruled that North Carolina violated the public's constitutional rights by failing to do more to protect the state's coastal fish populations from decades of overfishing. The decision, issued Tuesday, caps a legal battle that began in 2020 when the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina and more than 80 citizens sued the state over the collapse of once-abundant species like spot, Atlantic croaker and weakfish.
Judge Bryan Collins wrote that it is the state's duty to manage the public's trust fish, according to the News & Observer, and found that coastal fisheries resources are meant to benefit all citizens and future generations, not just the industries that harvest them. His 190-page ruling followed a six-week trial held earlier this year, as reported by Carolina Journal, which noted the case involved 86 citizen co-plaintiffs alongside the conservation association.
A Legal Foundation Built Over Six Years
The ruling holds North Carolina liable under three distinct legal standards: the common-law public trust doctrine, Article I Section 38 of the state constitution protecting the right to hunt and fish, which voters added in 2018, and Article XIV Section 5, which mandates natural resource conservation and dates to 1972, per the same Carolina Journal account. State lawyers had argued those constitutional provisions reflected policy goals rather than enforceable individual rights, but the court disagreed.
The case only reached trial because of a 2022 appellate ruling. That September, a unanimous panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals rejected the state's sovereign immunity defense, establishing that citizens can directly sue state agencies for failing to protect public trust natural resources — a precedent the News & Observer described as binding in this case. The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, which is tasked with monitoring each managed fishery and is supposed to restrict commercial and recreational fishing when needed to sustain populations, was represented by lawyers from the N.C. Attorney General's Office throughout the litigation.
Judge Rejects the State's Data Excuse
During the trial, former state officials testified that the fish population collapse resulted from years of ineffective mismanagement by the Division of Marine Fisheries, according to the News & Observer. Collins also dismissed the state's argument that missing data prevented plaintiffs from proving harm, calling that claim “specious at best” and ruling that the very absence of adequate data reflects a management failure, the outlet notes.
Greg Stunz described North Carolina's fisheries management as among the worst he had seen for U.S.-based fisheries, per the News & Observer's reporting. The state's 13 managed fisheries showed no signs of long-term viability, the ruling found, a conclusion that echoes broader data on the decline: the Raleigh News & Observer reports that in the 29 years since North Carolina's Fisheries Reform Act of 1997 took effect, state regulators never rebuilt a single coastal fish stock, and six of 13 managed species had collapsed or were collapsing by 2022, according to the North Carolina Wildlife Federation.
Decades of Decline Behind the Lawsuit
The scale of the falloff shows up in the numbers. Commercial fish landings in North Carolina's coastal waters, excluding menhaden, dropped 45 percent between 1997 and 2016, falling from 131 million pounds to 59 million pounds, per the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. Southern flounder, one of the state's most economically important species, saw commercial landings fall 80 percent between 1997 and 2019 despite a mandatory state management plan enacted in 2005 that was supposed to achieve a sustainable harvest by 2015.
A three-year study completed in July 2025 by the UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences, mandated by the General Assembly in 2021, found that state agencies suffer from a severe shortage of fisheries scientists, undermining their ability to meet the 1997 reform act's goals, according to Coastal Review. The staffing gap has fueled tension over how the state manages inshore waters, including a fight last year over shrimp trawling. In June 2025, the North Carolina Senate passed an amendment to House Bill 442 to prohibit inshore shrimp trawling within a half-mile of the coast, prompting protests at the state capitol from commercial shrimpers, as reported by SeafoodSource. North Carolina remains the only East Coast state that still allows large-scale inshore shrimp trawling in its estuarine sounds, a practice SeafoodSource says produces roughly four pounds of discarded finfish bycatch for every pound of shrimp harvested.
What Comes Next for State Regulators
The lawsuit accused North Carolina of allowing overfishing and shrimp trawling that led to the collapse of local fisheries, and the ruling now sends the case into a remedy phase that could include additional court proceedings. Parties to the lawsuit have 45 days to recommend how to proceed into that phase, the News & Observer reports.
A spokesperson for the N.C. Attorney General's Office said the office is reviewing the superior court's decision. David Sneed said he hopes the ruling will push the state's fisheries toward a brighter future, calling on the public, elected officials, scientists and state fisheries managers to work together to restore the resource for the generations that depend on it.
