A nonprofit corporation formed by Rhode Island fishermen is working with a major Boston law firm on a legal and constitutional challenge to the recently voted federal groundfish management plan that would transform the commonly held resources of the sea into privately held fishermen's catch shares.

Catch shares have become a bitterly divisive issue nationally, pushed hard by the Obama administration and many major environmental organizations, but resisted by many fishermen and at least one consumer group.

Tina Jackson, a Point Judith, R.I., fisherman and the president of the newly created American Alliance of Fishermen and their Communities, yesterday identified the firm formulating the Amendment 16 challenge as Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge.

Nancy Van der Veer of the firm — formed two years ago by merger of the Providence firm Edwards & Angell and the Boston firm Palmer Dodge — confirmed yesterday it "has been retained." Van der Veer declined to speculate on the legal case that might be filed.

Jackson said her group is hoping to win a request for a temporary injunction against the implementation of the Amendment 16 fisheries regulatory format.

She said she expects the suit will cost as much as $200,000.

"Considering the damage Amendment 16 will create," Jackson said, "we believe that it is worth every penny to go forward with this challenge."

Jackson said she had begun raising money from the boats of Point Judith at $1,000 per boat.

The Amendment 16 regulatory scheme was adopted last June by the New England Fishery Management Council. If successful, the lawsuit would not be the first to alter federal fisheries policy in New England.

A 2004 suit by the Conservation Law Foundation challenging the pace and efficacy of federally mandated restoration of the fish stocks off New England was the driving force in the Amendment 13 era.

The new amendment has been posted for public comment. After the 90-day comment period, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke must approve or disapprove the plan.

Among Amendment 16's major alterations in the groundfishing system is the introduction of catch shares — the division of the total allowable catch into portions assigned, in this instance, to fishing cooperatives known as sectors, which are now forming.

Thirteen of the 17 sectors along the coast were organized by the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a Maine to New Jersey industry group based in Gloucester.

Trading and leasing allocation is part of the approach, which was hatched in part within the Environmental Defense Fund and promoted aggressively by the organization. Only last week, the New England council, together with a campuses-based forum tied to EDF, held a two-day workshop on catch shares at the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort in Bretton Woods, N.H.

EDF also sponsored a high-profile research paper, "Oceans of Abundance," that was used in the transition between presidencies to promote catch shares. The report was anchored to scientific papers that controversially asserted that overfishing is quickly killing off the ocean ecosystems — and essentially suggested that, without catch shares, only jellyfish would be left to rule the seas.

Catch shares were made the No. 1 national fishery innovation of Jane Lubchenco, the former vice chairman of EDF selected by President Obama to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A former MacArthur scholar, Lubchenco lent her prestigious scientific reputation to the "Oceans of Abundance" effort.

As Lubchenco was challenging the New England council to approve the transition to catch shares and creating a privatized commodities market, an EDF vice president — David Festa — was advising investors on the West Coast that getting into catch shares on the ground floor would produce windfall returns of 400 percent or more.

Opposing catch shares is Food and Water Watch, a consumer group arguing that the system proposed is a giveaway, and that, instead of privatizing the stocks, catch shares can rented or leased, giving the government continuing control and over common property.

A consistent effect of converting to catch shares — or IFQs, the Individual Trading Quotas used in a minority of U.S. fisheries — is radical consolidation, reducing the size of the working fleet by at least half, and leaving a small number of large-capacity fishing businesses where a plethora of mom-and-pop boats once worked.

A member of the New England council, New Hampshire fisherman David Goethel, testified Tuesday at a congressional oversight hearing on the Magnuson-Stevens Act that, without congressional intervention, the New England way of life in the fishing ports would be destroyed.

Jackson said yesterday that Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge "is prepared to proceed on the industry's behalf provided we raise the funding needed to cover legal fees and expenses."

She said the case would be researched and filed from the Providence office.

Among the possible elements in a suit, Jackson said, was discrimination against the common pool of fishermen who elected not to join into a cooperative or sector in order to qualify for an allocation or catch share of the total allowable catch.

The council in June agreed to phase in catch shares for sectors while allowing individuals to continue to fish independently in common pool. After the council approved the allocation formula and the deadline passed for joining sectors, the council in September agreed to remove some allocation from the common pool and redistribute it to the sectors.

The precise amount of allocation to be shifted into catch shares from the common pool is to be decided at the November council meeting.

Amendment 16 also took a public relations hit last summer when dozens of fishermen complained that catch history reports from the National Marine Fisheries Service, to be used to determine individuals' allocation, were inaccurate. A spokeswoman for NMFS regional administrator Patricia Kurkul admitted the records were flawed, but said fixing them in time to adjust the allocation for the start of Amendment 16 was impossible.

The service gave fishermen until midnight Saturday to file corrective data reports for the 2011 fishing year.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.