This chapter illustrates the empirical significance of the fisheries law enforcement problem. History reveals changes in property rights to ocean resources have been significantly influenced by enforcement costs. Moving the fishery away from the open-access equilibrium towards a larger stock size increases enforcement costs and management benefits. Both historical evidence and logical reasoning demonstrate that enforcement costs are a major determinant of regulatory policy for nonexclusive resources. While feudal law in medieval Europe transferred to the state all property that previously had been common, only “utilized” fisheries were given legal status since “feudal law ignored resources whose definition or enforcement were prohibitively costly”. By the seventeenth century, an extensive treaty network recognized national claims to territorial seas. When in the nineteenth century important fisheries were threatened with depletion, multilateral agreements, such as the North Sea Convention of 1882, were formed to establish and enforce rights on the open seas.
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