During the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court handed down a significant ruling on personal location information and privacy, holding in Chatrie v. United States that law enforcement’s use of cellphone location data from Google constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Now, the justices have another opportunity to weigh in on government use of modern tracking tools, though not in the context of criminal investigations. The pending petition for review instead centers on the lobstering industry in Maine.
The dispute addressed in the petition dates back to 2022, when the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which creates fishery management plans for 15 states and the District of Columbia, updated its guidance on fishing for lobsters and Jonah crabs to include boat-tracking. In response, the Maine Department of Marine Resources imposed a rule requiring federally permitted lobstermen (apparently a gender neutral term) to carry a tracking device on their vessels that collects location data once per minute anytime the vessels are in use.
After Maine’s rule took effect, a group of lobstermen challenged it in federal district court, asserting that the rule violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” They contended that Maine could accomplish its goal of tracking lobster fishing activity with more tailored surveillance, emphasizing that the devices required by the rule would monitor even personal boat trips unrelated to the lobster business.
Maine moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the rule satisfies a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment for certain administrative searches – that is, inspections by government agencies – within closely regulated industries. U.S. District Judge John A. Woodcock, Jr. agreed that it served a “substantial government interest,” including the requirement to keep trackers on during personal trips. “[B]ecause it is essential that the data be accurate, the fact that lobstermen could forget to turn on the device would skew the results,” he wrote. Woodcock granted Maine’s motion to dismiss, but he “encourage[d] the lobstermen to appeal” to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit for “an authoritative ruling” on the Fourth Amendment issues involved.
One of the lobstermen, Frank Thompson, did just that, asking the 1st Circuit to review his Fourth Amendment claim. But in November, the appeals court affirmed Woodcock’s decision, holding that Maine’s tracking of lobster boats satisfies the three prongs of the Burger test, which the Supreme Court established in 1987’s New York v. Burger for assessing whether an administrative search can take place without a warrant. To pass, the challenged inspections must: 1) stem from a regulatory scheme that serves a substantial government interest; 2) be necessary to further that scheme; and 3) “give notice to those being regulated” and be limited “in terms of time, place, and scope.” The 1st Circuit acknowledged that Maine’s tracking scheme involves the near-constant collection of data when a boat is in motion – and thus does not appear, at first, to be limited – but concluded that it still passes the third prong because imposing a time limit “would frustrate the regime’s design” by enabling some boat trips to go untracked.
In March, Thompson appealed to the Supreme Court, urging it to revisit its Fourth Amendment doctrine and clarify how to assess government inspections that impact not just business operations, but also noncommercial activity. “The First Circuit’s decision to judge the reasonableness of 24/7 government searches of private property based on business owners’ reasonable expectations of privacy—not on their core Fourth Amendment freedoms from trespass to property—is precisely the kind of jurisprudential ‘miasma’ that this Court should clear up,” Thompson asserts in his petition for review.
Initially, Maine waived its right to respond to the petition, but, in early June, the court called for a response. In that brief, filed last month, the state contends that Thompson’s petition “focuses on an argument he never raised to the First Circuit:” that courts must go beyond the Burger test when assessing a challenged government inspection. “In sum,” the state writes, “the Petition presents a variety of reasons that weigh against granting it: unpreserved issues not addressed below; hypothetical questions that would not affect the case at hand; and arguments grounded in fundamental misconceptions of applicable precedent.”
Thompson v. Wilson is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their “long conference” on Sept. 28.