The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday in favor of an Alaskan moose hunter and his right to use a hovercraft on state land.
A lower court had ruled that federal regulations followed the National Park Service ban on the use of all-terrain vehicles that ride on a cushion of air. But Chief Justice John Roberts, in writing the court’s decision Tuesday, differed in conveying the justices’ unanimous opinion that the lower appeals court’s decision was wrong.
In response to the ruling, Alaskan state Rep. Shelley Hughes, a Republican in the state’s House of Representatives, tweeted the decision is “a monumental victory for Alaska!”
The high court’s decision provides a clear line for where Alaska’s authority begins and where federal law ends.
“No lands ‘conveyed to the state, to any native corporation, or to any private party shall be subject to regulations applicable solely to public lands within such units,'” Roberts said, citing the National Park Service’s statutory limits in enforcing rules when a hovercraft is used to traverse both state and federal lands in Alaska.
The bottom line is that the hunter, John Sturgeon, gets to use his hovercraft to go after moose in Alaska or for whatever else he fancies.
Roberts recalled in the decision that Sturgeon had hunted moose for nearly four decades, using the state-owned Nation River to traverse the rugged countryside. Until he was detained by federal park rangers in 2007, he never knew there was a problem in doing so. The rangers cited the 1990s law that bans hovercraft use on federal lands.
Sturgeon immediately sued, arguing in his initial case that the river was “owned by the state, and that the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act … prohibits the Park Service from enforcing its regulations on state-owned land in Alaska,” Roberts wrote. “The Park Service disagrees, contending that it has authority to regulate waters flowing through federally managed preservation areas,” he added, explaining that until Tuesday a district and federal appeals court both ruled in the government’s favor.
Roberts said the justices rejected that interpretation of the law by the lower court.
