102 SALMON GEAR LIMITATION 



as incident to the restrictive licensing scheme for fishing. Certainly 

 such matters as ease and effectiveness of enforcement are important. 

 As in the California case dealing with taxicabs, where the court 

 pointed out, "Exclusive stands may facilitate police supervision 

 . . . ,"^^^ here in the fishing industry, the legislature could well decide 

 that continued and improved enforcement of the proper escapement 

 would be best facilitated by the restrictive licensing system. Further- 

 more, this conclusion should be constitutionally valid, even though 

 someone else might decide that he could provide as good escapement 

 by some other method. This has been suggested, incidentally: i.e., 

 not to restrict the number of fishermen but to stagger various sep- 

 arately-fishing groups throughout the week. That the administrative 

 officials could or should consider this a difficult system to enforce, 

 as apparently they do, ought to be a completely adequate reason 

 for the legislature to reject it and choose in its place a restrictive 

 scheme, even in the absence of other advantages to be gained from 

 the restrictive scheme. 



One other subsidiary purpose of the legislature, should it decide 

 10 adopt a scheme for restrictive licensing of fishermen, is the desire 

 to ease or eliminate the hardship which such a scheme would impose 

 upon present fishermen should any of them be told he could not 

 thereafter fish. Such a consideration supports a classification of 

 persons into two groups — those who have been fishing and those 

 who would hereafter enter the fishery. This consideration is, of 

 course, a frequently recurring one and one which has usually resulted 

 in the enactment of a "grandfather clause." The validity of such 

 clauses has been upheld in many cases, as against a claimed violation 

 of the concept of equal protection. Because of the existence of one 

 case in Washington dealing with such a clause in the fishing industry, 

 a separate discussion of that case is, however, desirable. The case 

 \s State ex rel. Bacich v. Huse,^^^ a 1936 decision holding invalid 

 a provision in an initiative measure which limited the gill ncttcrs 

 to only those who had licenses in the years 1932 or 1933. The court 

 did not have pressed upon it the considerations outlined above which 

 here furnish the basis for legislative judgment that the number of 

 fishermen should be limited to some certain number. Rather, the 

 measure looked simply like a device to preserve the benefits of the 

 fishery to a few without any corresponding benefit to the state as 



133. 331 P. 2d at 27. 



134. 187 Wash. 75, 59 P. 2d 1 101 ( 1936). 



