United States Ninth Circuit
John v. Alaska Fish & Wildlife Conservation Fund, 09-36122
In a challenge to the 1999 Final Rules promulgated by the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture to implement part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (Act), the district court's decisions upholding the part of the Act concerning subsistence fishing and hunting rights are affirmed, where: 1) the Secretaries appropriately used notice-and-comment rule-making, rather than adjudication, to identify whose waters are "public lands" for the purpose of determining the scope of the Act’s rural subsistence policy; and 2) it was reasonable for the Secretaries to decide that the "public lands" subject to the Act's rural subsistence priority included the waters within and adjacent to federal reservations, and reserved water rights for Alaska Native Settlement allotments were best determined on a case-by-case basis.
Appellate Information
- Decided 07/05/2013
- Published 07/05/2013
Judges
- KLEINFELD
Court
- United States Ninth Circuit