Sunday Hunting Ban Upheld by Maine Supreme Court Despite Recently-Enacted Right to Food Amendment

The Maine Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s longstanding ban on Sunday hunting is constitutional despite the recently-enacted Right to Food Amendment.

Despite finding that hunting for food is covered by the terms of the new amendment, the Court determined that it also prohibits procuring food by illicit means, including “poaching.”

Based on the Court’s understanding of the term “poaching,” it determined that Mainers have a right to hunt except for “situations in which hunting is illegal,” including on Sundays.

In 2021, lawmakers in Augusta asked Mainers to weigh in a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution establishing a right to food that read:

“All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.”

This bill was introduced by Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winter Harbor) and backed by a bipartisan coalition of elected officials.

In November of 2021, more than 60 percent of Maine voters supported amending the state’s constitution to include the first “right to food” amendment in the nation.

Predating this by more than a century, however, is the state’s ban on Sunday hunting. First passed in 1883, there have been numerous legislative attempts to end the ban, but all ultimately have failed.

While these types of bans were once more widespread, Maine and Massachusetts are now the only remaining to two completely prohibit Sunday hunting, and 40 states have no laws governing the practice whatsoever.

The current statute governing Sunday hunting in Maine was passed in 2003 and has not been amended since.

This law prohibits individuals from “hunt[ing] wild animals or wild birds on Sunday,” and violations are considered to be a Class E crime that are punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

On April 27, 2022, Virginia and Joel Parker filed a complaint in Superior Court seeking to have the state’s Sunday hunting ban declared unconstitutional under the right to food amendment that had been approved by voters several months prior.

The Parkers argued in their filing that they had “a right to harvest food through hunting” under the new amendment, and therefore could not be constitutionally prohibited from hunting for food on Sundays.

In June of that year, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife asked the Superior Court to dismiss the complaint, which they did in December. Shortly thereafter, the Parkers appealed this decision.

The opinion released Thursday by the Maine Supreme Court explains that in deciding this case, they sought answers to two primary questions: Does the amendment create a right to hunt wild animals? And if so, does the ban infringe upon that right?

Although the Court found that the right to food amendment does create a limited right to hunting for the purposes of “nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being” through its use of the term “harvest,” they determined that the state’s longstanding Sunday hunting ban nonetheless remains constitutional.

The Court grounds this interpretation in the fact that the amendment explicitly states that it does not enshrine a right for Mainers to engage in a variety of illicit conduct in order to obtain food, including trespassing, theft, and — importantly — poaching.

Unlike the term “harvest” — which has an extensive record pointing toward its statutory meaning — the Court describes Maine statute and case law as “conspicuously bereft” of the term “poaching.”

Consequently, the Court looked toward a range of dictionary definitions to construct a common understanding of the word. It was on the basis of this definition that the Court determined the state’s longstanding Sunday hunting ban is not invalidated by this amendment.

“When the common definition of ‘poaching’ is applied to the amendment, the effect of the poaching exception is that the right to hunt exists in situations in which hunting is otherwise legal but does not extend to situations in which hunting is illegal,” the opinion states.

“Accordingly,” the Court continues, “the poaching exception in the amendment prevents the ban from conflicting with the amendment because hunting in violation of the ban is illegal, and the right to hunt created by the amendment does not extend to illegal hunting.”

“The poaching exception implicitly, but unquestionably, provides a grant of authority to the Legislature to define the parameters of the right to hunt that is created by the amendment,” says the opinion.

“In sum, we hold that the right to hunt for food created by the amendment does not extend to illegal hunting, and therefore Maine’s longstanding Sunday hunting ban does not conflict with the Maine Constitution,” the Court concludes.

Click Here to Read the Court’s Full Opinion