Definition
A fish commissioner is a public officer charged with the preservation, propagation, and increase of food fish throughout the country. The office originated at the federal level with the Act of Congress of February 9, 1871, which established a Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries — one of the earliest federal natural resource management positions in American law. The commissioner's statutory duties centered on investigating the causes of decline in food fish populations and developing means to restore and sustain them. Individual states also created analogous offices, sometimes titled fish commissioner or fish and game commissioner, with parallel regulatory authority over in-state waters and fisheries.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of a specific historical regulatory period. Researchers encountering "fish commissioner" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century materials should understand they are dealing with an early form of federal and state natural resource administration that predates modern environmental and wildlife agencies. The federal Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries was eventually absorbed into what became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service — so modern regulatory counterparts appear under entirely different names in contemporary sources.
The statutory reference in both Black's and Bouvier's points to the Revised Statutes of the United States, not to the United States Code as later organized. Researchers working with late nineteenth-century federal materials should note that citations to "Rev. St. § 4395" or "Rev. Stat. § 4305" (the two sources cite slightly different section numbers, likely reflecting different editions of the Revised Statutes) refer to the 1874 codification of federal law, not a modern U.S.C. title. Confirming the precise section in the applicable edition of the Revised Statutes is necessary before relying on the citation.
At the state level, the title and powers of the fish commissioner varied considerably. Some states gave the commissioner broad regulatory and enforcement powers, including authority to institute prosecutions for illegal fishing. Others limited the role to advisory or scientific functions. When researching state-level cases or statutes involving a fish commissioner, the researcher must establish which state's law governs and what that state's enabling legislation actually authorized, as the title alone does not define the office's powers.
The 1871 federal act is also historically significant as an early example of Congress exercising federal authority over a shared national resource — a legal move whose constitutional underpinnings connect to later Commerce Clause and public trust doctrine developments in natural resources law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's are in substantial agreement on the core definition: the fish commissioner is a creature of the 1871 Act, appointed with broad powers to preserve and increase food fish. Both cite the Revised Statutes as authority. The minor discrepancy in section numbers (Black's at § 4395; Bouvier's at § 4305) likely reflects either a transcription difference between dictionary editions or a variation between printings of the Revised Statutes and should be verified against the primary text.
Neither dictionary addresses the subsequent evolution of the office — the creation of the Bureau of Fisheries in 1903, its eventual consolidation with the Bureau of Biological Survey, or the modern successor agencies. This silence is expected given the publication dates of both dictionaries, but it means neither source is adequate for tracing the office beyond its founding period. Researchers needing the post-1871 administrative history must go beyond these dictionary entries to agency histories and subsequent federal reorganization statutes.
Neither source addresses state-level fish commissioners in any systematic way, treating the federal office as the primary referent. This is a gap for researchers primarily interested in state fisheries regulation.
Jurisdictional Note
While the fish commissioner as defined by Black's and Bouvier's refers to the federal office, most states established their own fish commissioners or fish and game commissioners through independent state legislation, with authority limited to state waters and subject to the particular scope of each state's enabling act. Federal and state jurisdiction over fisheries has been a recurring source of legal conflict, particularly in navigable waters and interstate rivers.