The Law Court’s recent decision in Parker v. Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife is fascinating—it is a rare instance when the Court has been called upon to interpret and apply a new constitutional provision. The Maine Constitution has had relatively few amendments, but in 2021 Maine voters approved a “Right to Food Amendment.” Parker involved a challenge to Maine’s Sunday hunting law prohibition under the new amendment.
As is relevant here, the amendment provides that “[a]ll individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to … grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing” for certain purposes, including nourishment. It then enumerates limitations on this right, conditioning the right on the requirement that the individual not commit “trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources.”
The question in the case was whether the Maine law banning