North Carolina has lost a case that anglers have been building for nearly six years. On Monday a Wake County judge held the state to account for the condition of its coastal fish, finding it had broken both the public-trust doctrine and its own constitution.
Superior Court Judge G. Bryan Collins Jr. wrote that the evidence "overwhelmingly established" decades of systemic management failure. His order runs 190 pages and follows a trial that sat from 20 January to 25 February, hearing from scientists, serving and former state employees, commercial fishermen, recreational anglers, guides and coastal residents.
For now, nothing changes at the ramp. No trawl ban, no gillnet restriction, no closures, no change to seasons, quotas or bag limits. All of that belongs to a remedy phase still to be scheduled — the judge gave both sides 30 days to meet and 45 to file a joint report on how it proceeds.
Money was never the point. Coastal Conservation Association North Carolina and 86 individual co-plaintiffs, five of them former Marine Fisheries Commission members, asked for a declaration plus a prospective injunction to force the state to rebuild its stocks.
Two constitutional provisions were found violated: Article I, Section 38, protecting the public's right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife, and Article XIV, Section 5, on conserving lands and waters. Collins noted a 2022 Court of Appeals decision had already established the state's affirmative duty here, and that it dictated the law he applied.
The stock findings are what will sting. Not one of the 13 species under a state fishery management plan currently demonstrates long-term viability — Southern flounder, blue crab, red drum, speckled trout, striped mullet, river herring, estuarine striped bass, shrimp, sea mullet, sheepshead, bay scallop, hard clam, Eastern oyster. Croaker, spot and gray trout, the bread and butter of shore and small-boat fishing, were found severely depleted.
A January 2026 UNC Collaboratory report commissioned by the General Assembly backed the plaintiffs: five of six adequately assessed stocks were being overfished, and four were already overfished.
Estuarine shrimp trawling and gillnets both drew hard findings. The order describes hundreds of millions of juvenile fish killed as trawl bycatch with the population-level effect never properly measured, and concludes gillnetting at current levels strips out older breeding fish and makes recovery unlikely.
Enforcement barely exists by comparison. Marine Patrol fielded 58 sworn officers in January across roughly 2.5 million acres of coastal water. The Wildlife Resources Commission has 224 officers; the State Highway Patrol more than 1,600 troopers.
The state's argument was that nature is not a defendant's fault. Assistant Attorney General Ashton Roberts told the court managing a wild ecosystem is a balancing act and the state cannot answer for "the whims of nature," per Axios Raleigh, and pointed to some 18 million recreational fishing trips a year in the state. Collins found the plaintiffs' experts credible and observed the state offered no expert on whether its management system worked overall. Its fallback — that missing data made the case unprovable — he called "specious at best," since gathering that data is the state's own responsibility.
CCA NC executive director David Sneed struck a conciliatory note. "Coastal fishing in our great state could have such a bright future," Sneed said in the group's announcement.
The North Carolina Wildlife Federation, an amicus rather than a party, was less gentle. "The court affirmed what we have said for years: the state has a responsibility to protect and manage our fisheries for the benefit of all citizens and future generations, and our current system has failed to meet that responsibility," said CEO Tim Gestwicki, who added, "We cannot effectively conserve what we fail to adequately measure," and summed it up: "This ruling makes clear that managing decline is not good enough."
Commercial fishing had no seat at the table. The N.C. Fisheries Association's bid to intervene as a defendant was denied back in 2021. Its long-held position is that recreational anglers, commercial licence holders and seafood consumers all hold rights in the resource; that North Carolina's management process is among the most rigorous in the country; and that stocks migrating between states under interstate or federal plans cannot fairly be laid at one state's door.
CCA counters that its target was always the state, not the fleet. It argues commercial fishermen largely did what the state permitted them to do, and points to the statewide river herring moratorium and the partial striped bass moratorium as proof that mismanagement costs commercial operators too.
No statement had come from the Attorney General's office, the Department of Environmental Quality, the Division of Marine Fisheries or the Fisheries Association by Tuesday afternoon. A Senate-passed shrimp trawl ban is still parked in the House, and the remedy phase will play out alongside it.
