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.
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.