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The matter moved to the proper legal forum in Feb. 2024, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (SJC.) A key victory. Click HERE to read the news report by the Portland Press Herald.

In the 1600s, lawmakers permanently cemented the public’s right to use all beaches. And their definition of public use was logical. Of course they could imagine only three public uses, because way back then that’s all common folks used the beach for: “fishing, fowling and navigation.” The modern meaning for fishing, fowling and navigation --- the three public uses in a distant century --- logically includes all of today’s public uses, many more than three. The original legal intent was never to define public use in the narrowest possible terms for all eternity. It was to permanently protect all public uses.

Shoreline owners who try to bully people off beaches commonly rely on a bluff: that they pay taxes down to the low water mark. Yet at Moody Beach, for instance, not a single beachfront owner pays a single penny in taxes for sand over which ocean water routinely flows. The town of Wells collects not a single penny in taxes from them for that land.

The State of Maine owns all intertidal land, and the updated meaning of public use allows every citizen to enjoy all intertidal lands and beaches along the Maine coast.

In 1989 the Maine Supreme Court erred in a matter brought by Moody Beach cottage owners and overturned 350 years of settled law. The four members of the Court who ruled in favor all owned shorefront property personally. The three who dissented did not. Leah Saufley, a recent Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court (retired in 2020), wrote that there is “strong and compelling argument” for revisiting the flawed 1989 decisions, which she described as “founded upon a faulty legal analysis.”

A lawsuit brought in 2021 by people who agree with Saufley has moved to the state’s Supreme Court. New judges there can fix the 1989 mistakes. A key issue will be the argument that the way modern Mainers use the beach and other intertidal land should fall within the broad definition of fishing, fowling, and navigation. That’s where the case stands now.