The headline is funny, but the opinion is boring and obvious. The act itself defines the term "fish":
‘[f]ish’ means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate,
amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”
It's just a technicality. A statute was written using the term "fish" in a bunch of places, and rather than replace "fish" with "fish, mollusk, invertebrate, &c" in every place where that term was used, they just changed the definition. Every statute you'll ever read has explicit definitions, presumably for this exact reason.
Fun fact: for a time, according to Dave Arnold, the Catholic church defined beavers as meat, but beaver tails as fish. You could eat the tail on a Friday, but not the rest of the beaver.
I don't understand. I think the term "fish" was defined in the text, so fish is akin to a variable name with its true identity defined in a single place. So they wanted to add something to the term "fish" so they changed that one place.
Seems more sensible and less error prone than using "fish, mollusks..." everywhere and doing a ctrl+f and adding a ", bees" everywhere. Doing the ctrl+f approach would be the hack IMO. I guess they could have changed the variable name as well but legal documents probably aren't written in IntelliJ or some other tool where you can confidently believe that you changed every occurrence. Plus, you don't have compiler warnings!
Unless I'm misunderstanding something or your comment...
Except they don't. "Fish" in this context is a term of art, clearly defined in the legislation. If the people who wrote this legislation actually believed bees were fish, then they would not have gone out of their way to provide such a clear and specific definition of the term for the purposes of this legal document.
To the lay person, legalese often sounds silly, but it is not without purpose or direction.
The mistake they made is that they used a much broader category in the clarifier for the definition of fish than they may have intended to. "Invertebrate" is a massive section of the animal kingdom. Poor choice of words if they only meant the wet ones.
> The mistake they made is that they used a much broader category in the clarifier for the definition of fish than they may have intended to. "Invertebrate" is a massive section of the animal kingdom. Poor choice of words if they only meant the wet ones.
The court examined historical evidence specifically to evaluate the argument that the law was intended to apply only to “wet ones” and rejected that argument.
Only if the intent of the law is ambiguous enough that the courts find themselves unable to parse it. This language is certainly a bit odd, but it was plenty easy for the courts to suss out what was meant here.
If the legislature disagrees with the court's conclusion, then they are free to amend the legislation in question.
Among the reasons we have courts is to clear up ambiguous law; this question of the definition of the word falls squarely on the shoulders of the judiciary, and there is no procedure for referring a question like this to the legislature (and at the rate legislators operate, imagine if we had such a procedure... People's court cases would be jammed in limbo for even longer waiting for the legislature to stop pocket vetoing their question).
Adding a system for that would not be impossible but would have to be done carefully. Instead, we have the system as it currently operates... The law says what it says, the courts declare interpretations if people disagree, and the legislature may, but is not obligated to, act to pass law with further clarification if they have concern with the court's interpretation.
This law is not remotely ambiguous. You don't have to read tea leaves to figure out what a fish is. A bumble bee is a fish; it says so right in the text of the law, unmistakeably.
I'm not convinced it was an accident. They took an existing statute, decided they wanted to extend it, and did it in the lazy way of adding "invertebrates" to "fish" instead of replacing the word "fish" all over the place.
The "bug" is (or rather, isn't) in this phrase: "[n]o person shall import into this state, or take, possess, or sell within this state, any bird, mammal, fish, amphibia or reptile, or any part or product thereof, that the commission determines to be an endangered animal or rare animal, except as otherwise provided in this chapter." I guess there must be a very good reason why they didn't want to add "invertebrate" (or, to be safe, "other animal") to this list and instead chose to repeatedly expand the definition of "fish". Ok, "fish" included crustaceans, and those are related to insects, so if you squint hard enough...
You don't have to wonder about this. The court tracked down the context behind the definition, and it was written specifically to include terrestrial invertebrates (including the Lange metalmark butterfly and the Trinity bristle snail).
The only reason this seems complicated is because the headline of this post has asked us to find it complicated. The real story is quite boring.
As the Court sees it, there is no "gap." The legislature defined fish to include terrestrial invertebrates, including discussing one specifically (a snail).
The Court has to do something to resolve the issue. Either the legislature meant to include some but not all terrestrial invertebrates (e.g. snails but not bugs), or they included all (snails and bugs). The court went with the literal meaning of what the legislature wrote rather than drawing arbitrary lines without support.
> The Legislature is the body to address the gap, not the court.
They did. They said that “fish” includes, among other things, any inverterbrate.
The people challenging the executive action authorized by the legislature with this language wanted the court to declare that “any invertebrate” in the law does not include bees. But the courts are the wrong place for this: if they think the executive branch should not have regulatory authority over bees which the legislature has granted it over all invertebrates, they should take this to the legislature (or the people, acting via the power of initiative) to alter the grant of authority.
That is not in fact the question. The headline of this story asks you to believe it's the question, but the real story is much more boring than that, which you'll easily see by reading the actual decision. No, in fact, the word "invertebrates" was chosen specifically to include several endangered terrestrial invertebrates.
They did, when they explicitly defined "fish" to include bumble bees. You're the one asking the court to find meaning not present in the letter of the law.
The legislature did address the gap. The legal text, as passed by the legislature, defines fish (within the context of the document) to include invertebrates. They could have called "fish," anything in this case. They could have called fish, apples. Doesn't make a difference.
It couldn't be clearer. ignoring the text of the law and then declaring the court to have not done its job is ridiculous. In fact, if the court IGNORED the text of the law, I'd think that they'd be more open to a "legistlating from the bench," critique.
For example, many traffic laws refer to roadways as highways, even if e.g. it is a driveway or a backalley.
> The issue presented here is whether the bumble bee, a terrestrial invertebrate, falls within the definition of fish, as that term is used in the definitions of endangered species in section 2062, threatened species in section 2067, and candidate species (i.e., species being considered for listing as endangered or threatened species) in section 2068 of the [California Endangered Species] Act.
> We conclude a liberal interpretation of the Act supported by the legislative history and the express language in section 2067 that a terrestrial mollusk and invertebrate is a threatened species (express language we cannot ignore), is that fish defined in section 45, as a term of art, is not limited solely to aquatic species. Accordingly, a terrestrial invertebrate, like each of the four bumble bee species, may be
listed as an endangered or threatened species under the Act.
Flagged as inaccurate. The court does not find bees are fish, the court finds that the legal text defines fish to include invertebrates, which bees are.
California court finds that bees fall under classification defined by legal text is a more appropriate headline.
Actually, this wacky judge did say bees are fish. The reasoning goes like this. The statute says that the definition of fish included invertebrates (having no backbone). While technically, fish are not invertebrates, the legislature obviously meant to include other forms of aquatic life, like invertebrates, into the definition of fish, for instance sea slugs.
Now, there are terrestrial invertebrates as well, for instance, bees. No reasonable person would think that the legislature meant to include terrestrial invertebrates into the definition of fish. But, that's what this judge did, giving the absurd result that bees are fish.
Wildly inaccurate. The "wacky judge" had no choice but to find that bumble bees fit the definition of "fish" set in the statute, because the definition in the statute was specifically written to include them. Not just aquatic invertebrates, but indeed explicitly terrestrial ones as well --- the Lange metalmark butterfly and the Trinity bristle snail, among others.
Nobody who actually read the decision could be left with the impression that this is about what "reasonable people" would understand the term "fish" to be, because that's not remotely what the statute itself says.
The judge took those definitions from other parts of the law. An interpretation should not result in an absurd conclusion. If so, your interpretation is wrong.
Here's what the judge should have said. "In this part of the law, 'invertebrate' refers to a fish. In other parts of the law, 'invertebrate' refers to terrestrial animals. Obviously, the legislature did not mean to include terrestrial animals as fish. Therefore, a bee is not a fish".
Obviously, the legislature intended exactly that, as the decision explains. The dispute here is about whether California has the authority to designate bees as endangered species, not whether it has the authority to regulate fisheries with respect to bees.
In October 2018, the public interest groups
petitioned the Commission to list four species of
bumble bee as endangered species: the Crotch
bumble bee, the Franklin bumble bee, the Suckley
cuckoo bumble bee, and the Western bumble bee
(collectively the four bumble bee species)
[... 2 grafs ...]
In September 2019, petitioners challenged the
Commission’s decision by filing a petition for
writ of administrative mandate in the trial
court. Petitioners asserted the Commission’s
determination that the four bumble bee species
qualify for listing as candidate species under the
Act “violated the Commission’s legal duty, was a
clear legal error, and was an abuse of
discretion.”
There's a bunch of problems with the argument that California can't legally designate bugs as endangered species, one of which is that the act was amended specifically to protect endangered butterflies in the first place, the other of which is that it would be an insane result.
It's an easy opinion to read. You can just get this from the document linked on the thread. It's all right there.
> The judge took those definitions from other parts of the law.
No, the judge took examples from other areas of the law as evidence against the argument that the Legislature could not have intended what the plain language of the definition in the section of the law in dispute directly says. The definition was not taken from a different section of law, only evidence against the effort to reinterpret the definition in a narrower way than it's plain language suggests.
> We acknowledge the scope of the definition is ambiguous but also recognize we
are not interpreting the definition on a blank slate. The legislative history supports the liberal interpretation of the Act (the lens through which we are required to construe the Act) that the Commission may list any invertebrate as an endangered or threatened species.
> (the lens through which we are required to construe the Act)
It was the legislature which decided to shoehorn in a number of definitely non-fish creatures to the definition of fish. There was debate about including butterflies, and that was before invertebrates were even added! It's...well it's obviously insane, but reading through it I'm kind of persuaded. Sure California legislature, birds are fish. Whatever spares you the trouble of typesetting a new section.
This is why research ontologies split labels from concepts, and link them with contexts (e.g. citations). When parties join into this framework of understanding then discussions get down to the nitty-gritty details of what meaningful work can be done with the concepts. None of this says that any of it is "real", complete, precise etc., it says that if we agree on x, then we can do something useful, y. Want to label "the exoskeleton bearing 6 legged ... etc." a "fish"? Go ahead, we'll go back to think, read, and understand what is being discussed, and given this deeper understanding agree to do something useful (perhaps preserve said "fish"), or not, i.e. we'll do law-stuff in this case.
This of course doesn't work unless the parties agree to playing in the shared framework, otherwise labels/words have untethered power, which is typically what happens on the internet. It also isn't universally effective, sometimes going deep gets in the way of doing meaningful stuff.
In general, "law-stuff" uses the definitions specified in the law. If a word isn't defined, then they can look at how other laws define the word. Then they could look at the definition in a dictionary. This is established process.
The proper way to get this useful thing done is for the legislature to amend the law to be more inclusive.
Not quite. The problem with the way the law is drafted is that the court could have just as easily (and perhaps more likely) applied the legal rule of construction known as noscitur a sociis (Latin, it is known by its associates) and interpreted "invertebrate" in context to mean something more like wet invertebrate.
That, ultimately is what makes the drafters of the pertinent amendment to the statute look sloppy, like they do not know what they are doing. The court could have reasonably gone either way, and without some failure prone inquiry into legislative history they may not have any way to tell what the legislature intended.
The doctrine of noscitur a sociis is simply shorthand for a standard way to resolve ambiguities like this, but the court used a different rule, making the legislature look silly for allegedly defining all invertebrates as fish for the purposes of this statute. Allegedly.
No, they can't, because the legislature wrote that law specifically to protect a series of endangered terrestrial invertebrates, and chose a word that has a plain meaning that includes terrestrial invertebrates. There's simply no complexity here.
This isn't an accident of law; there was a whole huge kerfluffle in the 1980s in California about where the authority to protect insects came from, and this was considered carefully at the time.
Again, this is right there in the decision linked at the top of the thread.
Philosophy tells us this is one way to change concepts, another is to narrow definitions, both have known limitations. There are many ways to do meaningful things, by this definition "proper" just means something meaningful was done?
In earlier times, even biologists did not make a distinction – sixteenth century natural historians classified also seals, whales, amphibians, crocodiles, even hippopotamuses, as well as a host of aquatic invertebrates, as fish.
Edit: to put things into perspective, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish.
Today fish is generally defined as chordates (vertebrates) minus tetrapods (four limbed things like amphibians, reptiles and mammals). Not a taxonomic category, but more scientific than including all things that live in water. This of course excludes those things we refer to as "shellfish," which are generally mollusks or crustaceans.
Bumblebee doesn't even come close to any definition of fish. It doesn't live in the water, and isn't in the same clade than includes all living fish (as we are, being tetrapods).
Not sure what you mean by "most species of fish evolved independently," by the way.
> Bumblebee doesn't even come close to any definition of fish.
It fits well within the only relevant definition of fish, the one explicitly written in the statute under which the Fish and Game Commission operates, and of which the challenge to their action would have required the court to disregard the plain language.
The issue here isn't what the word fish means in general usage, it's what the California State Legislature granted the California Fish and Game Commission regulatory authority over, and in the law granting that authority, all inverterbrates are expressly included.
Reading the link, it appears most species of 'fish' have as most recent ancestor, some ancient sea sponge or something. They became what they are through independent evolutionary paths. It's called something like 'convergent evolution' and its a common thing, where environmental pressure causes wildly different original organisms to evolve to look and act nearly the some. It's true with fish, trees and I imagine other things.
See, just because they look about the same doesn't mean they share any common parentage.
Well the common ancestor of all living fish would be more like a lancelet, which is nothing like a sea sponge. (it is bilaterally symmetrical and has a "notochord" which is like a primitive spinal chord.
The main issue I have with the parent's comment is the idea that "most species" evolved independently. No, most species have a whole bunch of other species very closely related to them.
There are a few major branches of fish, such as ray finned (most fish) and lobe finned, the taxanomic category of the latter also includes tetrapods, and only has a couple of species that are still actual fish, such as coelacanth and lungfish. And above that distinction, there are bony fish and cartilaginous fish, such as sharks and rays.
But still, even if fish is not monophyletic, it is not polyphyletic, which means all things considered fish are "connected" to other fish.
The statute explicitly defines “fish” for the purpose of the power at issue as “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.” [Cal. Fish & Game Code § 45, emphasis added]
A bumblebee is, unmistakably, a “fish” under the applicable statutory definition. The challenge to the executive branch action here called on the court to disregard the express language of the statute granting regulatory authority.
Somewhere, on some metaphysical plane, Diogenes is running desperately through the equivalent of a hallway towards the equivalent of a forum with the equivalent of a can of tuna in his hand.
"definition of fish, as that term is used in the definitions of endangered species in section 2062, threatened species in section 2067, and candidate species (i.e., species being considered for listing as endangered or threatened species)"
I.e. what the Fish and Wildlife folks have domain over.
Just like fish, trees aren't real. There's no single evolutionary branch where we go from non-tree to tree. What we call trees are speckled throughout without seeming rhyme or reason.
It's mostly because our fuzzy definitions of things are just that, fuzzy. Tall, thick, bark-covered plant? Yeah, tree. Water-breathing legless animal? Fuck it, fish.
Tomatoes are fruits and everyone loves this fact. But so are bell peppers. And I think cucumbers. In fact, most vegetables are technically fruits (anything with a fruiting body is a fruit). And half the nuts are legumes. And legumes are fruits. And all fruits are also vegetables. Because vegetables are the part of plants we eat. But most vegetables are some other sort of plant life.
So in short, our classifications and definitions are more what you'd call "guidelines".
Trees are significantly less of a thing than fish! Fish are almost a phylogenetic class; just remove reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, and insects! It's like measure, there are only countably many discontinuities. Trees are more like fins then fish. There are pairs of trees whose last common ancestor wasn't a tree, and visa versa. Many non-trees are just a few genetic tweaks away from being trees, suggesting evolution has kept around a master control switch in case the environment favors trees one day. Trees are...
...what was the original subject? Trees are just so cool
That's fine with me. I suppose if other arthropods are already legally classified as fish then it's not much of a leap.
Not sure what impact bees have on aquatic ecosystems though - I was able to google something about potential pollination of a few aquatic plants - but that seems very minimal. The terrestrial mollusk they mention, the Trinity Bristle Snail [1] is found along river ecosystems and would presumably have more of an impact on those aquatic ecosystems.
But if a loophole is needed to protect the bees then it's probably a good idea.
> But if a loophole is needed to protect the bees then it's probably a good idea.
If the legislature did a bad job drafting the law, the courts shouldn't just say "well, bees are important". Reject it and make the legislature pass a better law if they want to protect bees. Otherwise it's not rule of law, it's rule of courts.
> If the legislature did a bad job drafting the law, the courts shouldn't just say "well, bees are important"
They didn't just say bees are important, nor did they find that the legislature did a bad job drafting the law (which, in general, is not their job—qualitative assessment of legislative output and correction—either direct via initiative/referendum or indirect by replacing legislators—as necessary is the job of the electorate, not the judiciary, in California.)
The court said that the law as written explicitly says that ‘fish’, for the purpose of the grant of power in the law, includes, among other things, all invertebrates, and the historical evidence is consistent with that meaning exactly what it says, including terrestrial invertebrates, so the executive branch agency acting under power granted by the law with respect to ‘fish’ is correct in applying that power to bees, which are within the scope of the law’s explicit grant of authority.
If the people of the State disagree with the law granting power in this way they have the tools to correct it, and it's not the courts job.
What you’re describing is basically the split between “liberal/conservative” (separate from the political usage) interpretations of law. Liberal justices don’t see themselves legislating from the bench but interpreting law as Do What I Mean instead of Do What I Say.
At any point the legislature is still allowed to correct the record and override the court’s interpretation by making their position explicit.
If they don't like this ruling, the legislators are free to draft legislature to clarify and correct it.
As you describe, they can do their jobs. If they don't, we have to assume that they are fine with this interpretation.
It's a common misconception among American technologists that law is some kind of code that you can deterministically, and unambiguously execute on a VM, and come up with the same result every single time.
If that's the sort of thing you're looking for, you could try moving to a Civil Law country. You have a lot of options in this case - most of the world runs on Civil Law. In the boundless wisdom of the founding father, America forked its legal system from the United Kingdom, and is therefore a Common Law nation, where courts can routinely interpret legislature as they see fit, and set binding precedent when they do so.
"If they don't, we have to assume that they are fine with this interpretation."
That method of operation leaves it open to future disputes. It's better to have a well defined law that doesn't rely on interpretation as those interpretations change over time.
Not to mention, this interpretation should never have occurred to begin with. It's a concept in law that you cannot ignore or contradict the wording of a law to pursue its spirit. This clearly defines "fish" in such a way that it is inconsistent with the text. That one also must use the definitions defined in the law, defined in similar laws, or defined in the dictionary. Which this meets none of those.
"It's a common misconception among American technologists that law is some kind of code that you can deterministically, and unambiguously execute on a VM, and come up with the same result every single time."
That is the goal - that the law is defined in a way to produce consistent results and is applied equally. That's why we have rules of procedure, follow precedent, etc.
> That method of operation leaves it open to future disputes.
That method of operation is precisely how the legislature and the judiciary in this country works. Based on a decision made ~250 years ago.
When a law is open-ended, the judiciary clarifies it. If the legislature doesn't like this clarification, it passes a new law. If the legislature includes a contradiction to the clarification in the new law, the courts take this into account as a strong indicator of how the law should be interpreted in the future.
> It's better to have a well defined law that doesn't rely on interpretation as those interpretations change over time.
If you believe this strongly enough, you should consider moving to a Civil Law nation, where the process I described does not happen. This is a Common Law nation, that is built on this process.
> That is the goal - that the law is defined in a way to produce consistent results and is applied equally.
This goal, like a spherical cow, is impossible to meet. In practice, ambiguities and uncertainties always exist, and every country's political system has a process for resolving it. This country's process is a push-and-pull between the judiciary and the legislature.
(1) It is not in fact a concept in law that the wording of a law must always trump the intent of its authors; in fact, that's a hotly debated topic (this is the distinction between "textualism" and "originalism").
(2) We don't even reach that problem here, because there is no ambiguity about what this statute says. To find that bees aren't fish, the court would have had to literally ignore the whole statutory definition.
(3) There's no "interpretation" (in the natural sense of the word) involved here. The statute defines the term we're debating, explicitly, exactly because they don't want courts to make up their own definition for the term "fish".
"(1) It is not in fact a concept in law that the wording of a law must always trump the intent of its authors"
I have precedent in my state that says otherwise - that you cannot ignore the text to pursue the spirit.
"We don't even reach that problem here, because there is no ambiguity about what this statute says"
Please explain what invertebrates was added under fish with other aquatic-relates species while the other addition of plants was given its own category.
Further, the same logic used by the parent also makes the statute incoherent, because it explicitly protects other things that can't possibly be retconned into a reasonable definition of fish; amphibians simply aren't fish. Their argument proves too much.
I suppose you could ask the legislators involved, but the courts decision is to apply the law, not probe the aesthetic choices of the legislature that aren't relevant to understanding the meaning of the law.
They specifically did not do that. The court tracked down the origin of this change in the definition of the law, and the legislature at the time was acting in part to preserve an endangered terrestrial snail. If they'd meant "aquatic invertebrates", that's what they'd have said.
They already stated that the snail was a mollusk. It still seems you're ignoring the context of the fact that they added invertebrates under the fish heading, while they added other classes (plants) under their own headings. That context seems to indicate aquatic relation. Perhaps it was just them being lazy, but it would have been more proper to have it as it's own classification as was done for plants. This whole thing would have been unnecessary if they were good at being lazy and said they had the power to regulate species without making all these classifications.
This snail is a terrestrial mollusk, so that doesn't help you. But even if it did: the legislature was also trying to protect 3 different butterflies along with the snail. I don't think there's a way to weasel out of this.
Hey guys, there's no scientific definition for a fish either. Evolutionarily speaking, from the perspective of monophyletic taxonomy, if fish were a thing, we'd also be classified as fish. We're not though we're vertebrates. Bees are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates, as are all insects generally, as adults adapted to land rather than being amphibious, even if they have an amphibious larval stage, which bees don't. There is a tendency to consider anything less evolved than an amniote as a fish in general practice. That would include insects.
Okay, but for real, why then would the law not have been written to apply to all animals? It seems like they were being specific.
Especially for the purposes of the endangered species act - insect classification is already tricky enough. You could have two nearly identical bugs except for which side of the river which they spawn on. And now you are required to estimate the population over every type of insect and determine its endangered status, and use it as an insurmountable veto power on any new developments?
As pointed out by Stephen Jay Gould and the show QI - "There's no such thing as a fish". Likewise, there's no such thing as a tree.
Try asking a person in the street "Is X an animal" - where is bumblebee, fish, roach, dustmite, jellyfish. The default image of animal is a dry mammal or bird.
As I understand it, the law has a section for birds, a section for mammals, and a section for fish. The section for fish might better be termed Animals that are not mammals or birds, but I guess that gets cumbersome.
So it begs the question, what's the legal definition of invertebrate? The scientific definition includes species that could cause a variety of legal complications such as microanimals.
The phylogenetic nomenclature is basically textbook cope; coping with the fact that the ancient word of fish doesn't align well with what biologists have learned. If you want to create a scientifically and genetically sound classification of 'fish' that roughly aligns with what people already know fish to be, then you have to make it a phylogenetic group to exclude humans, whales, lizards, snakes, etc. It's a mess.
But it's a mess biologists unnecessarily made for themselves, by trying to adapt an ancient word to their new discoveries. I prefer the traditional approach: fish do exist, they are simply animals that live in the water. It's not a genetic classification, simply a folk taxonomy. Salmon and hagfish both live in the water, so they're both fish. Dolphins live in the water, so they're fish too. Starfish and jellyfish are both fish. Sea turtles are almost fish, but not quite because they lay their eggs on dry land. Coral are a tricky edge case.
Any Catholics in the audience may remember when the Vatican did something similar with capybara to address the dietary / fasting needs of some South American communities.
Certainly, the endangered species act ought to include insects, but as written it just doesn't. The opinion itself makes that crystal clear by showing the plain language of the act itself, the context of the relevant language, and the legislative history.
In context, it's clear that the legislature intended "invertebrates" to mean aquatic ones. There is zero textual evidence to the contrary.
The California legislature ought to step in and do a quick amendment to include insects and be done with it.
This court is legislating from the bench. This opinion is an embarrassment to the legal profession.
Having just read the plain letter of the law, it lists "invertebrate" as one of the categories in the group "fish" and makes no qualifier on type of invertebrate.
This is why careful phrasing is key in legislation. Nothing curtails the legislators' authority to give fish and game authority over things that most people don't think of as fish.
It would be nice if the legislature would pass a law to clarify their intent, but the amazing thing about the way the law works is they can just refrain from doing so, this President stands, and everyone wins with no further effort. Kinda elegant in its own weird way.
This analysis seems like a reach. The definition specifically includes "amphibians", putting frogs in its plain meaning, and plenty of toads aren't aquatic in any ordinary sense of the term.
It seems more as if your conclusion, that we should ignore the plain meaning of the word in the statute and instead try to capture the ineffable intent of the authors of the statute to discern precisely which invertebrates they meant, is the one with less grounding. If they wanted the statute to refer to "aquatic invertebrates", they'd have said so.
Certainly, and fish love to eat mosquito larva. If being aquatic is a vital part of an animals lifecycle, then it makes sense to consider those animals aquatic in the context of regulating water matters.
I disagree, because the statute is about protecting fish and wildlife; protecting fish inherently implies protecting the environment of fish; water. There is obvious practical sense in defining fish to include any sort of animal that lives in the water, as all amphibians (including toads) do for at least part of their lives.
The court followed the law as it was written, which is good. And there is nothing inherently wrong with the law classifying all invertebrates as fish; many invertebrates are fish in the folk taxonomical sense, and there's no harm in accidentally pulling in wholly terrestrial vertebrates like bees.
But was the classification of bees as fish an accident? It doesn't matter; the law is what it is and the court decided correctly. But, nevertheless, we can still wonder whether it was an accident. I think it was. All the categories of animal categorized as fish by this law have a strong connection to water. What are they?
Crustaceans are sometimes terrestrial, but most are fish.
Amphibians are all characteristically aquatic early in life, and look like fish. Some remain aquatic their entire lives.
Mollusks are sometimes terrestrial (garden snails), but the majority of mollusks are aquatic and mollusks are the largest marine phylum, making up a plurality of all named aquatic animals. The mollusks people in America like the most, and consequently think about the most, are all seafood.
Invertebrates.. that's the contentious one. Technically, if not legally, invertebrates include all mollusks, as well as jellyfish, corals, sea anenomes, worms, etc. A whole lot of invertebrates are aquatic animals. It seems to me that if a well intentioned but busy lawmaker were trying to make a list colloquially defined fish (animals that live in the water), invertebrates could easily get roped into this list (along with toads, and terrestrial crustraceans.)
Notably missing from this list of fish are types of animals that are rarely or never aquatic; it doesn't list squirrels as fish probably because one does not think of water when they think of squirrels. But if the lawmakers had been prompted to think of beavers, perhaps they would have written rodents into their definition of fish.
Does or should it matter to the court? No, I don't think so. They should and did go by what the law said. But that doesn't mean HN commenters can't or shouldn't discuss what we think the lawmakers actually meant when they wrote this.
We're talking about the law that allows California to designate endangered species. The side of this case that lost tried to argue that California can't designate bees as endangered, because it lacks the authority to designate terrestrial invertebrates as endangered. As the decision points out: that's clearly false. The technical definition of "fish" was amended in the 1980s specifically to protect terrestrial invertebrates.
Isn’t the ruling based on the fact that there are terrestrial invertebrates explicitly qualified based on their inclusion in the “fish” category? What should you do when the legislature says “this law protects squares, and by squares we mean any planar shape with 4 sides.”
The court took this step because certain terrestrial invertebrates were explicitly added to the category. So it can no longer be interpreted as somehow only being aquatic critters. "Zero evidence" is a strong claim and much of this entire judgement is about how there is evidence.
They could have just as easily considered the terrestrial invertebrate in question (the Trinity bristle snail) to be an exception or to fall under "mollusks". The problem is that there are canons of construction by which they could go either way. The statute is poorly drafted.
Fun fact: for a time, according to Dave Arnold, the Catholic church defined beavers as meat, but beaver tails as fish. You could eat the tail on a Friday, but not the rest of the beaver.