The Tsukiji market, just north of Tokyo Bay, is the largest fish market in the world. Each day, over 40,000 licensed buyers and sellers crowd the fifty-acre market to trade over 400 species of fish, shellfish, roe, and every other type of seafood. From the tiniest shrimp to the largest bluefin tuna, nearly every ocean species can be found at Tsukiji. But it is this last item, the bluefin, one of the largest and most prized fish at the market, that has created not just an international controversy, but a threat to the relations of some of the world's most powerful nations. For the tuna - particularly the large, migratory Atlantic bluefin -  is, despite its large size, a microcosm of sorts for the general environmental and species degradation exacerbated by global trade, commerce, and industry. And the management (or lack thereof) of bluefin stocks represents much of what is wrong with current environmental treaty systems and international protection mechanisms.

The Atlantic bluefin presents a classic commons dilemma: one valuable resource, few real property rights. Moreover, the bluefin's highly migratory nature takes it through multiple jurisdictions and the high seas, allowing any fisherman with modern fishing equipment and a spotter plane to take what he can from the now diminishing stocks. Such easy access has proved devastating: Stocks in the eastern and western Atlantic have crashed to below twenty percent of pre-industrial biomass, yet nations still permit their fishermen to fish well above scientists' recommended catch limits. Worse yet, illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing has, by some assessments, doubled the annual catch that regulators have deemed acceptable. Though the international bodies that are supposed to regulate Atlantic bluefin fishing have lowered quotas in recent years, this has done little to stem the stock's decline. As of 2009, scientists wonder whether even a complete ban will allow the Atlantic bluefin to recover. Yet fishing persists.

The global failure to enact any meaningful treaties protecting the Atlantic bluefin reveals as much about the current state of international species protection as it does about the tuna's fate. The current treaty regimes that protect the bluefin are, as this Note will demonstrate, both inefficient and improperly designed, and they afford too much voting power to those nations with little stake in the bluefin's long-term survival. Moreover, the treaty organizations do not represent the will of those nations that actually fish the bluefin in high quantities, and the organizations' decisionmaking thus fails to internalize the political costs of overfishing.

Interestingly, the bluefin market operates in almost the same way: Those buying and consuming the Atlantic bluefin - particularly Japanese consumers, who comprise eighty percent of the total consumer market - have failed to internalize the economic costs of overfishing, and instead push these externalities onto the bluefin stocks and the long-term fishing interests of all bluefin-fishing nations. This problem is by no means unique to the Atlantic bluefin. Hundreds of other commons species have been unnecessarily hunted to extinction. Recently, however, international agreements such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and a number of other regional management treaties have attempted to force international cooperation to overcome this commons tragedy. Unfortunately, for reasons that this Note will discuss, such measures have not met great success.

The Atlantic bluefin provides an important test case for a number of reasons. First, it has been well studied, and there exists substantial scientific literature on its biomass and the detrimental effects of overfishing. Second, the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) - the forty-eight-nation treaty organization responsible for overseeing the management of the fish - provides, in the case of the bluefin, a perfect example of international coordination gone wrong and reveals an inherent problem of environmental treaty organizations that attempt to do too much without realizing their own structural and political limitations. Third, unlike other commons situations, the nature of the bluefin market may actually lend itself to a market-based, property-rights solution. This Note will discuss each of these issues in turn.

Part I provides a brief introduction to the Atlantic bluefin, its market, and the reasons why nations have been unable to adequately protect this commons species. Part II then assesses attempts at international management and looks at the political and structural reasons why these institutions are failing in their mission. Part III turns to fisheries management theory and offers several property-rights regimes that may help mitigate the problem of Atlantic bluefin overfishing. Finally, Part IV returns to political and implementation problems of property management regimes, looks at whether an international property-rights regime can be instituted for the Atlantic bluefin, and then argues that, because of the unique features of the bluefin market, there does exist the possibility for such an implementation.