Maine's War for the Shore

A trivia fact you may not know: Maine is one of the few states where private landowners -- not the state -- own the seabed exposed at low tide. And under a controversial 1989 court decision, public easements were defined as being limited to those delineated in a document adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647: "fishing, fowling, and navigation."

The 1989 decision is regularly ignored in practice and has been condemned by legal scholars, the State of Maine, and even some high court justices themselves. Now there appears to be fresh motion toward redefining public trust rights in the intertidal zone, a topic I've written about in today's Maine Sunday Telegram.