Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/oystering-hybrid-property-and-the-commons
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 20:51:31+00:00

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3. The Legislative Response: Preserving Inefficiency?
abstract. Property theorists hypothesize a trend of evolution toward efficiency and conventionally hold formal privatization out as the logical endpoint of this trend. Oystering, in particular, has often been cited as a context in which privatization is highly efficient. Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century, public ownership of Connecticut’s valuable oyster grounds persisted throughout decades of economic and technological change. The history of Connecticut’s hybrid regime in oyster grounds, which variably applied enclosure and common ownership to otherwise similarly situated areas, shows that such regimes can emerge and thrive for both economic and political reasons.
author. Yale Law School, J.D. expected 2015. Thanks to Claire Priest, Sheila Jasanoff, Courtney Dixon, Allison Grossman, Molly Wasser, and the staff of the G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport. I am especially grateful to Conrad Scott and the Yale Law Journal Notes Committee for their thoughtful comments, and to Robert Ellickson for his encouragement and expert guidance.
Captain Bob was a typical example of the second sort of oysterman.2 Unlike Rowe, Captain Bob went to sea in a sail-powered sloop, the Broadbill, with only a few hired hands to help him haul in the dredges. Nor was Captain Bob an owner of the seabed. Instead, he worked the public grounds off Bridgeport, where hundreds of small boats like his competed to gather wild oysters. At the end of the day, if conditions were favorable, he might have forty bushels to show for his labor.
This history is especially surprising in light of the conventional account of the development of property rights. In this account, law evolves toward efficiency, and in turn, valuable resources are subjected to private ownership in order to maximize production and minimize waste.5 Indeed, the law and economics literature has specifically cited oystering as evidence for the proposition that privatization promotes efficiency.6 According to the conventional account, then, one might have expected comprehensive enclosure of oyster grounds from an early date. Connecticut’s stable and productive bifurcated system of property in oyster grounds, under which common ownership persisted for decades, seems to contradict this narrative.
In this Note, I explain Connecticut’s somewhat puzzling two-tiered property regime. Drawing extensively on primary source material, I demonstrate that this regime enabled the use of efficient modern technologies while simultaneously preserving an open-access resource cherished and depended upon by multitudes. Moreover, I show that dividing the Long Island Sound into private and public territories generated productive biological and trade interactions across territorial boundaries, mitigating the efficiency losses associated with the partial preservation of the commons. Because of these economic and political advantages, the hybrid regime survived and thrived.
My historical findings have several theoretical implications. In offering the first in-depth account of Connecticut’s oyster property system and its origins, I join the many writers who have shown that reality often contradicts the conventional tale of evolution toward efficient formal privatization and that alternative property systems often prove viable because they fulfill important societal needs—economic and otherwise. My account also demonstrates that these viable alternative property systems include hybrid regimes—that is, regimes that impose different property rules at different points in space or time. There have been few studies of such hybrid regimes from any perspective.7 In addition to expanding this small literature with a novel historical study, I make two contributions to our theoretical understanding of hybrid regimes. First, I show that regimes that are hybrid across geographic space, like Connecticut’s, can give rise to efficiency-improving interactions among constituent territories subject to different property rules. Second, and more fundamentally, in contrast to existing studies of hybrid regimes—which heavily emphasize economic efficiency—I demonstrate that hybrid regimes can emerge and thrive because of their political functions.
This Note is organized in four Parts. Part I reviews the literature on the emergence of property rights, on alternatives to formal privatization, and on hybrid property systems, and it more fully situates this Note within these bodies of literature. Part II briefly provides context on the oyster and its cultivation. Part III looks back to the history of Connecticut oystering and shows that, although relevant law initially developed in apparent harmony with the typical tale of evolution toward efficiency, by the late nineteenth century Connecticut had chosen a different path—and succeeded nonetheless. Part IV explains this apparent anomaly with reference to both economic and political dynamics.
Similarly, factors apart from economic cost and benefit shape the political context within which interest groups battle.22 When competing interest groups are numerous and heterogeneous, negotiation is difficult, and the status quo is more likely to persist.23 When information concerning the value of parties’ positions under current and proposed regimes is hard to procure, compromise solutions may be similarly unattainable.24 Meanwhile, the electorate to which interest groups appeal may be unfamiliar with, or reflexively distrustful of, novel property rights systems. Longstanding arrangements may have developed ideological or sentimental value over time, which, in turn, may reduce the perceived legitimacy of new systems and of the authorities attempting to impose them.25 In these ways, even efficiency-promoting revisions to property rights can entail substantial process and bargaining, causing social conflict and making these revisions unlikely—especially when the potential efficiency gains are likely to be modest.26 When these political “costs” are factored into the efficiency equation, preserving or tinkering with the status quo of non-enclosure may be the best approach—even if theoretical economic efficiency gains are abandoned in the process.
Many of the critiques of such tales share a methodological simplification, in which a non-Demsetzian property regime is described in relative isolation and portrayed as applying the same set of rules to all relevant instances of a resource. For example, Ellickson explores the functioning of a norm-based property regime governing rangeland in Shasta County, and Berkes analyzes the management of village fishing waters through collective, informal regulation. Heller’s account of the Chesapeake’s polyphonous “oyster culture” appears to take a further step by acknowledging the interpolation of multiple forms of regulation within a single, resource-specific property regime. However, Heller does not explore whether the Chesapeake system applied the same set of (jumbled, non-Demsetzian) rules uniformly, or whether the Chesapeake system treated apparently similar resources differently depending on their particular attributes.
Although these everyday instances of property hybridity may seem unremarkable, hybridity can substantially improve the efficiency and stability of property regimes. Henry Smith, one of the only scholars to consider hybrid regimes in any depth, has observed that the interaction of different property rules across time can promote important social goods.39 Smith coined the term “semicommons” to describe a regime in which a resource is sometimes common and sometimes private, and in which “both common and private uses are important and impact significantly on each other.”40 Smith illustrated the semicommons concept through the apparently inefficient but surprisingly durable medieval open-field system. Under this regime, land was held and farmed privately most of the time, but at certain times the private right to exclude was suspended to allow for grazing by the village’s collective herd across all parcels.41 The hybridity of the open-field system allowed villagers to engage in multiple kinds of production and enabled valuable interaction between productive activities.42 For example, the herd left manure on the land, providing a valuable input to private grain-growing later in the year.43 At the same time, informal institutions restrained the negative consequences of (occasional) common ownership.44 In these ways, temporal hybridity promoted economic efficiency.
Smith’s work on the semicommons provides several fundamental insights about hybrid property regimes. First, regimes defined by hybridity can and do emerge and persist in the real world. Second, by enabling and facilitating coexistence among, and interaction between, multiple forms of production requiring different property arrangements, hybrid regimes can provide important benefits. Third, hybrid regimes benefit from regulation, whether formal or informal, to prevent individuals from exploiting hybridity to their benefit but to the community’s detriment.
The rest of this Note extends Smith’s insights by documenting and analyzing an unusually vivid historical instance of hybrid property regulation. During the late nineteenth century, Connecticut developed a hybrid property regime, encompassing both common and private territory, to govern the rich oyster grounds of the Long Island Sound. Hybridity was the defining feature of this regime in its legal structure, its political history, and its day-to-day functioning. For this reason, Connecticut’s historic oyster-ground property regime is an ideal case study on the origins and functions of hybrid property systems.
In exploring Connecticut’s hybrid property system, this Note both adds to and expands upon Smith’s work. The literature on hybrid regimes is not extensive. By documenting another real-world instance of hybrid property regulation and its functions, this Note further develops that literature and substantiates Smith’s insights.
Moreover, this Note adds to current understanding of the semicommons in two important ways. First, I analyze a property regime that is hybrid over geographic space, rather than hybrid over time. A central point of Smith’s analysis is that a semicommons regime can benefit from efficiency-boosting interactions among the sub-regimes that comprise it. Smith’s essay focused on interaction among property sub-regimes, each of which applies to resources within the semicommons at different times—that is, sub-regimes that are spatially but not temporally coincident. On the other hand, I demonstrate that similar positive interactions can emerge if each sub-regime applies only to certain resources within the semicommons, but all operate at the same point in time—that is, if sub-regimes are temporally but not spatially coincident.45 Few scholars have studied spatially hybrid property regimes in depth. To be sure, various articles have noted the obvious fact that such regimes exist,46 and a few have considered the efficiency benefits that such regimes may offer by pairing particular resources with particular property rules.47 Nevertheless, these accounts do not explain the functions that the interaction of public and private property across space serves, and in turn, they do not fully explain how and when mixed regimes can serve as durable solutions to the struggle for rights to valuable resources. This Note aims to help fill this gap.
Second, and more fundamentally, I demonstrate that hybrid property regulation can promote political concord as well as economic efficiency, and that they can survive for that reason. In his article, Smith focused on the economic benefits of temporal hybridity, and explicitly adopted (if only for the sake of analysis) the simplified Demsetzian account of property rights, in which efficient arrangements tend to emerge.48 Similarly, those scholars who have studied spatially hybrid systems in depth explain them in terms of economic efficiency.49 At the same time, scholars recognize that politics also shape the development (or lack thereof) of novel property regimes.50 This Note is the first to address explicitly the political functions of property hybridity. I trace the roots of Connecticut’s hybrid regime to longstanding political conflict and demonstrate that it survived both because of its subtle efficiency virtues and because it embodied a distributional and symbolic compromise between warring elements of Connecticut’s polity.
The early history of oyster regulation in Connecticut more or less squares with the classical Demsetzian narrative, in which rising resource values trigger new restrictions on property ownership.
The law was changing, but the state of the art was changing faster, and by the late nineteenth century, the need for wholesale legal change was clear. This Part describes the stresses that affected the Connecticut oyster industry in the 1870s and 1880s, and details the legislature’s response. I show that the oyster reforms of 1881 halted the trend toward full privatization of the oyster grounds. Nonetheless, the property regime these reforms established survived and even flourished in the following years.
At first glance, the reforms of 1881 collectively seem like another halting step toward efficient law. In allowing steam-powered oystering and creating well-administered private property rights in the seabed, these reforms introduced regulatory innovations that allowed oystermen to capture the higher profits and productivity that could come from modern technologies and full enclosure. True, the 1881 reforms left many of Connecticut’s oyster grounds out of this legal revolution. Following Demsetz, it would be reasonable to imagine that this anomaly would soon be corrected. After all, the legislature had demonstrated its willingness to make fundamental legal changes in order to facilitate efficient production, and the natural beds were apparently not efficient.
The natural or public beds are not so carefully and thoroughly worked as the private beds are, and no systematic efforts are made to destroy the star-fish . . . .
. . . In the free scramble for the oysters, [the natural growthers] have no thought but “to keep what they get and catch what they can,” and it would be lost time to them to dredge for stars while others dredge for oysters. . . .
But in spite of its apparent inefficiency and contrary to the typical narrative, the natural bed system—and the hybrid property regime that enshrined it in law—lasted well into the twentieth century. Years after the 1881 reforms, the Baltimore Sun reported that “[w]hile there are many differences of opinion . . . the general feeling is one of satisfaction with the present law.”147 The state’s cartographical and adjudicatory efforts over the following years maintained a large amount of territory as “natural bed,” and in some cases, the state commission even revoked grounds previously granted to cultivators (including Henry Rowe) and declared them public.148 Natural growthers continued to fight, both before the state commission and in court, to sustain and expand the area open to the public, and they sometimes prevailed.149 Here, apparently, was an inefficient property regime that stubbornly resisted evolving with the times.
The previous Parts have demonstrated that a simple narrative of evolution toward efficiency partially explains Connecticut oyster law and its history. The universal right to unrestricted oystering was first restricted when increasing demand and limited natural supply caused depletion, thereby raising the costs of open access. Later, the property regime shifted toward enclosure, as (1) booming demand and the advent of rail increased the value of the resource, and (2) new technologies (first planting, then cultivation, and finally capital-intensive deepwater cultivation) rendered private ownership, with the long-term investment and economies of scale it enabled, uniquely beneficial. Other legal reforms increased the efficiency of the property system and the benefits of private ownership by simplifying and partially centralizing its administration, removing scale restrictions, and more clearly establishing boundaries. Finally, the introduction of efficient steam power prompted additional changes in the form of legislation that protected the right to use steam.
The natural bed system is an anomaly within this narrative. Under this system, valuable beds were subjected to a common property system that reduced output and promoted waste. Yet, despite its disadvantages, this system persisted for decades.
In this Part, I seek to explain this anomaly. I demonstrate that the history of Connecticut’s spatially hybrid property regime partially undermines efficiency-oriented theories of the emergence of property law. Section A describes the subtle but important efficiencies that emerged from interactions between the territories within the hybrid regime. Section B shows that, to the limited extent that the hybrid regime was economically inefficient, its political virtues made up for the loss.
Many pranks were played by the Fair Haven men upon their unwelcome competitors from the surrounding town . . . . On one morning when the [seasonal restriction] was off, Hezekiah Bradley’s canoe was found standing on end in an apple tree, up on the hill where the Shore Line railroad now runs . . . .
The invasion of the grounds by the outsiders seemed to the small local fishermen little short of robbery. As the beds were natural beds the other parties had legal right of access to them, however, and the small fishermen could only protest and set forth their grievances. This they did, until all of the offending parties but one—Lorenzo Smith of New Haven—agreed to keep off the grounds.
Although these and other informal exclusion measures predated the hybrid regime, it is likely that this regime’s limited establishment of private property actually strengthened them. As Daniel Fitzpatrick has recently written, attempts to supplant informal, non-state property regimes with formal, state-enforced private property rights often prompt devolution to open access.158 The formal regime may lack enforcement capacity sufficient to exclude those with competing claims under the old regime, but, at the same time, pressure from advocates of the formal regime, as well as rising resource values, may degrade the social and institutional underpinnings of the old regime.159 By alleviating the pressure of potential enclosure from the natural beds, and by defining a territory in which their traditional governance system could continue unchallenged, Connecticut’s hybrid system likely preserved the legitimacy and stability of informal governance. The hybrid system may in turn have significantly limited efficiency losses from the natural beds.
Connecticut’s natural beds were subject to relatively few formal controls, but the situation on the water was far from anarchic. Rather, robust informal controls existed to restrict and define access rights. Connecticut’s hybrid regime, like the common property regimes chronicled by Ostrom and Ellickson, thereby achieved a measure of efficiency in the natural beds without imposing formal privatization on them. Moreover, in relieving political and economic pressure on those beds by establishing separate, privatized areas, the hybrid regime reinforced the social foundations that, as Ostrom and Ellickson have emphasized,160 are needed for informal controls to persist. Connecticut’s experience therefore suggests that hybrid property regimes can both benefit from and augment common property institutions.
In addition to preserving and strengthening the natural beds’ informal regulations, Connecticut’s hybrid regime enabled productive economic and biological interactions between privatized and public production territories—that is, interactions over space, as opposed to the intertemporal interactions emphasized by Smith in his study of the open-field semicommons.161 These interspatial interactions further reduced the efficiency consequences of preserving the natural beds.
A hybrid system was a particularly deft response to this political pressure. Resisting any major change to the property rights status quo governing certain long-familiar grounds, Connecticut’s legislators preserved the unique symbolic values and social mobility opportunities associated with formally open access to the natural bed and thereby avoided massive political fallout. At the same time, they sacrificed the more marginal political gains from similarly maintaining the public status of deepwater and cultivated beds, which historically had not been cultivated and therefore were not linked to attentive, entrenched communities of users and voters. The State of Connecticut, by subjecting these beds to an entirely different set of property rules that provided sufficient protection for investment, was able to reap the economic rewards of modern oyster production to a considerable extent, all the while reassuring voters of their right to the oyster grounds they knew and loved.
Connecticut’s experience thus reinforces the conclusions of those theorists, such as Libecap, who have augmented efficiency-oriented theories of the origins of property with accounts of how politics can divert the evolution of property rights away from theoretical maximum efficiency. Yet Connecticut’s experience also shows that those subject to political pressure can and do act to minimize the economic distortion that political pressure can generate, and that spatially hybrid property regimes can serve as useful tools in this regard. Such regimes can defuse political tensions that relate to specific geographic areas (such as Connecticut’s natural beds). Perhaps more importantly, however, a spatially hybrid property regime is an overarching compromise that still allows for relatively pure sub-regimes to exist within it. Such an arrangement may prove particularly effective where competing political and economic demands require such purity. As an example, Connecticut’s legislators established a substantial zone of relatively unfettered access, satisfying those whose visions of freedom and equality demanded nothing less. At the same time, the legislature subjected large tracts to complete enclosure, providing cultivators with the high degree of certainty needed for intensive investment. By establishing a system of coexisting extremes in this way, Connecticut was able to meet the demands of both sides to a much greater extent than a spatially uniform compromise might have done.
The golden years eventually drew to an end. Over the initial decades of the twentieth century, pollution, pests, hurricanes, and bad spawning conditions laid waste to the Connecticut oyster industry.200 But while the industry thrived, it was a major economic force and a national model. Its bifurcated property regime embodied a contested but durable compromise among diverse interests and sectors of society, enabling prosperous and sufficiently peaceful coexistence for several decades.
The Connecticut oyster industry of the 1800s may be gone, but its history has much to tell us about property rights and their emergence. To an extent, the form and development of the industry’s property system provide general support for Demsetz’s cost-benefit argument. From early protections for planters of Chesapeake seed to the steam-friendly perpetual franchise regime of the 1881 reforms, Connecticut’s property laws evolved to enable the greater economic benefits that changing technologies and markets made possible. Yet this wave of legal change only advanced so far. From its eventual dissipation and the dogged survival of the imperfectly efficient, eminently traditional natural bed regime, we can draw two broad conclusions about property law.
First, many forms of property regulation other than formal privatization can promote economic efficiency, including internally heterogeneous, or hybrid, property systems, as Connecticut’s experience demonstrates. Specifically, the history of Connecticut oystering shows that spatially heterogeneous regimes encompassing both common access and privatization can sustain informal institutions that mitigate costs and foster efficiency-enhancing internal interactions.
Second, efficiency-focused explanations of the emergence of property rights and the existence of hybrid property systems are fundamentally incomplete. Property hybridity can emerge and survive not only when it is economically optimal but also when it fulfills political imperatives. Connecticut’s natural beds were a resource with particular ideological and political resonance, and this resonance was amplified in the economically and socially tumultuous years of the late 1800s. The history of Connecticut’s regime of hybrid property in oyster grounds is one of lawmakers who struggled to reconcile this unique political resonance with the promise of efficient production. It proves both that efficient privatization does not inevitably triumph in property law and that ultimately no single regime may triumph.
In sum, Connecticut’s historic oyster property regime demonstrates that spatially hybrid property regimes can have both economic and political virtues.201 Moreover, the specific functions of Connecticut’s spatially hybrid regime, and the specific needs it fulfilled for that state’s oystermen, entrepreneurs, and voters, reflect circumstances in which hybrid regimes may be more likely to emerge and persist in the real world. For example, Connecticut’s experience suggests that, where common access to certain areas is highly politically salient, legislators may be more likely to preserve common access intact within those areas and push privatization further elsewhere rather than bringing all areas under a regime that embodies both open access and private property features. Similarly, where a high degree of certainty is required to encourage investment, legislators may provide it through privatization in certain areas and push common access elsewhere. Legislators may also be more likely to strike such a spatial compromise when common-access areas produce a usable output for enclosed areas despite overexploitation, thereby mitigating the economic costs of partial non-enclosure. Finally, legislators may be more likely to choose a hybrid regime when that regime is able to preserve or even strengthen existing informal governance mechanisms in open-access areas.
To be sure, these modern regimes are more sprawling and sophisticated than the system that governed Henry Rowe and Captain Bob. But, just like Connecticut’s regime, these modern regimes use hybridity in an effort to attain a reasonable balance among citizens’ diverse goals, values, and ways of life. The history of Connecticut oystering shows that hybrid property regimes can succeed in this fundamental task, and that they can serve as stable, productive solutions to the never-ending struggle for property rights.
Detail from an 1889 map of Connecticut oyster grounds, showing natural beds and rectilinear private tracts off the coast of Bridgeport and Stratford. The famous Bridgeport natural bed is the trapezoidal area at top center. Courtesy Mystic Seaport, G.W. Blunt White Library.
Demsetz, supra note 5, at 350.
See, e.g., Banner, supra note 10, at S361.
Levmore, supra note 5, at S421.
See Banner, supra note 10, at S360-61.
Id. at 17; see also Banner, supra note 10, at S360.
See Libecap, supra note 17, at 18.
See Libecap, supra note 17, at 28.
Robert C Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes 167, 181-82 (1991).
See James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (1988).
Id. at 48-49, 64-65, 73-75, 101-04.
See supra notes 27-32 and accompanying text.
Heller, supra note 5, at 47.
Smith, supra note 39, at 133.
See John M. Kochiss, Oystering from New York to Boston 5-6 (1974).
See Ernest Ingersoll, A Report on the Oyster-Industry of the United States 58-87 (1881).
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 6-7; Rowe, supra note 1, at 274.
See Rowe, supra note 1, at 275.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 5-7.
See, e.g., Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 61.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 91-123.
See id. at 81-82, 85-86, 88.
See id. at 89-90; Collins, supra note 3, at 465, 469.
See Virginia M. Galpin, New Haven’s Oyster Industry, 1638-1987, at 17 (1989).
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 11.
See Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 64.
See Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 613; Galpin, supra note 66, at 13.
See Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 61.
See Galpin, supra note 66, at 14.
See Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 613-14.
See Galpin, supra note 66, at 13.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 9-10.
See An Act for Encouraging and Regulating Fisheries, 1784 Conn. Pub. Acts 78, 78.
See Galpin, supra note 66, at 13-14.
See Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 63.
See Galpin, supra note 66, at 17.
See Oyster Trade at Fairhaven, supra note 91.
See id.; The Fair Haven Oyster Trade, supra note 88.
See Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 621; The Fair Haven Oyster Trade, supra note 88.
See Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 72-77; Kochiss, supra note 51, at 17.
See An Act Regulating and Protecting the Planting of Oysters, 1855 Conn. Pub. Acts 112.
See Sweet, supra note 58, at 594.
See Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 615.
See, e.g., Collins, supra note 3, at 468.
The Fair Haven Oyster Trade, supra note 88.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 131-32.
See Catching Oysters by Steam Power, supra note 1.
See Rowe, supra note 1, at 273.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 20-22.
See Monopoly of the Oyster Grounds, supra note 70.
Notes from the Commission, supra note 72.
Change in Oyster Laws, Sea World, Jan. 5, 1880 (Rowe Scrapbook).
See An Act To Prohibit the Dredging for Shell Fish by Steam, 1879 Conn. Pub. Acts 442.
See The Steam Dredge Bill, supra note 1.
Oyster Legislation, supra note 1.
Atwater et al, supra note 69, at 614.
Oyster Dredging, supra note 2.
Fitzpatrick, supra note 18, at 1000-01.
See supra notes 40-45 and accompanying text.
Oyster Farming, supra note 147.
Collins, supra note 3, at 489-90.
Long Island Oyster Beds, supra note 169.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 167-68.
See supra notes 178-179 and accompanying text.
See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 161; Collins, supra note 3, at 463.
Rowe, supra note 143, at 1.
The Oysters’ Enemy, supra note 60.
May Work Natural Oyster Beds, supra note 149.
Town Meeting in Guilford, supra note 181.
See Galpin, supra note 66, at 30-34.
See Fish Comm’rs & Shell Fish Comm’rs of the State of Conn., Sixteenth Annual Report of the Fish Commissioners and First Report of the Shell Fish Commissioners of the State of Connecticut 74 (1882) [hereinafter 1882 Report]; Catching Oysters by Steam Power, Sea World, Aug. 4, 1879 (on file in the Oystering Collection, collection 121, vol. 1 (“Scrapbook No. 1 (Henry C. Rowe, New Haven, Connecticut)”)), G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport [hereinafter Rowe Scrapbook]); Henry C. Rowe, Deep Water Oyster Culture, 13 Bull. U.S. Fish Comm’n 273, 274, 276 (1893); Oyster Legislation, Norwalk Sentinel, Apr. 7, 1880 (Rowe Scrapbook); The Steam Dredge Bill, New Haven J.-Courier, Mar. 4, 1880 (Rowe Scrapbook).
Captain Bob’s last name has been lost to the ages. He was the subject of a 1904 profile in the New York Tribune, from which I have taken this description. See Oyster Dredging: Long Island Sound Is Yielding Well This Year, N.Y. Trib., Nov. 6, 1904, at B6 [hereinafter Oyster Dredging].
See J.W. Collins, Notes on the Oyster Fishery of Connecticut, 9 Bull. U.S. Fish Commission 461, 461, 480-81 (1889).
In contrast, efforts to regulate oystering and enclose oyster grounds in other American fisheries generated violent conflict. See, e.g., Bonnie J. McCay, Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History (1998); Anna Maria Gillis, Oyster Wars, Humanities, May-June 2011, at 6, http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/mayjune/statement/oyster-wars [http://perma.cc/B4YD-KH3D] (Chesapeake Bay).
The canonical account is Harold Demsetz, Toward a Theory of Property Rights, 57 Am. Econ. Rev. 347, 350, 354-58 (1967). See also Michael Heller, The Rose Theorem?, 18 Yale J.L. & Human. 29, 46 (2006) (outlining “the familiar ‘scarcity story’ of institutional economics,” associated with Demsetz and Ronald Coase, in which informal regulation and communal property rights give way to formal private property); Saul Levmore, Two Stories About the Evolution of Property Rights, 31 J. Legal Stud. S421, S421 (2002) (describing the “conventional story” of increasingly private property rights and corresponding increases in value and economic activity).
In a series of frequently cited analyses of mid-twentieth-century oyster-yield data, Richard Agnello and Lawrence Donnelley found that states with stronger private property rights in oyster grounds tended to enjoy higher labor productivity in their oyster industries. See Richard J. Agnello & Lawrence P. Donnelley, Externalities and Property Rights in the Fisheries, 52 Land Econ. 518, 525 (1976); Richard J. Agnello & Lawrence P. Donnelly, Prices and Property Rights in the Fisheries, 42 S. Econ. J. 253, 259-60 (1975); Richard J. Agnello & Lawrence P. Donnelley, Property Rights and Efficiency in the Oyster Industry, 18 J.L. & Econ. 521, 522 (1975); Richard J. Agnello & Lawrence P. Donnelley, Regulation and the Structure of Property Rights: The Case of the U.S. Oyster Industry, 6 Res. L. Econ. 267, 278 (1984); see also Alison Rieser, Oysters, Ecosystems, and Persuasion, 18 Yale J.L. & Human. 49, 51-52 (2006) (stating that Agnello and Donnelley’s “account apparently has become the standard fare in economics textbooks and the oyster something of a poster child for the campaign to privatize the fishery commons”).
See id.; Thomas W. Merrill, Introduction: The Demsetz Thesis and the Evolution of Property Rights, 31 J. Legal Stud. S331, S331-33 (2002). Demsetz’s case in point is the early Canadian fur trade, in which the rising value of furs and the consequent expansion of hunting increased externalities to common hunting ground ownership and prompted a move toward enclosure. See Demsetz, supra note 5, at 351-52.
See, e.g., Stuart Banner, Transitions Between Property Regimes, 31 J. Legal Stud. S359, S360-61 (2002); Heller, supra note 5, at 46.
See Demsetz, supra note 5, at 350, 356-57 (“[P]roperty rights develop to internalize externalities when the gains of internalization become larger than the cost of internalization. Increased internalization, in the main, results from changes in economic values . . . . [P]rivate ownership of land will internalize many of the external costs associated with communal ownership . . . . The reduction in negotiating cost that accompanies the private right to exclude others allows most externalities to be internalized at rather low cost.”).
See Terry L. Anderson & P.J. Hill, The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West, 18 J.L. & Econ. 163, 165-68 (1975).
See Levmore, supra note 5, at S422 (“[T]here are many [historical] examples that surprise the conventional storyteller.”).
See, e.g., Gary D. Libecap, Contracting for Property Rights 16, 120-21 (1989); Terry L. Anderson & Peter J. Hill, Cowboys and Contracts, 31 J. Legal Stud. S489, S496-97 (2002); Katrina Miriam Wyman, From Fur to Fish: Reconsidering the Evolution of Private Property, 80 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 117, 136-39 (2005).
Libecap, supra note 17, at 16, 120-21; Daniel Fitzpatrick, Evolution and Chaos in Property Rights Systems: The Third World Tragedy of Contested Access, 115 Yale LJ. 996, 1000 (2006).
See id. at 16 (“Capturing a portion of any rents that can be saved by more precisely defining property rights motivates individuals to organize for collective action to adjust property institutions . . . . [L]obbying politicians and other government officials for new or increased government support for existing private property rights will activate other interest groups in the political process.”); id. at 25 (recognizing that changes in resource values can catalyze new bargaining); id. at 28 (“The greater the concentration of wealth under the proposed property rights allocation, the greater the likelihood of political opposition . . . .”).
Cf. Fitzpatrick, supra note 18, at 1000 (noting that state actors’ ability to enforce property rights regimes depends in part on the actors’ legitimacy).
See Fikret Berkes, Marine Inshore Fishery Management in Turkey, in Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property and Resource Management 63 (Panel on Common Prop. Res. Mgmt., Nat’l Res. Council ed. 1986); see also Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action 18-20 (1990) (describing Berkes’s study).
See Elinor Ostrom, Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms, 14 J. Econ. Persp. 137, 149-53 (2000).
Heller, supra note 5, at 46-47; see also Carol M. Rose, The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems, 83 Minn. L. Rev. 129, 139-40 (1998) (discussing the “limited commons” concept).
See, e.g., Roy Rosenzweig & Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park 473 (1992); Ben Yakas, NYPD to People Exercising in City Parks: Your Asses Are Ours After Dark, Gothamist (Mar. 1, 2014, 4:30 PM), http://gothamist.com/2014/03/01/nypd_to_people_exercising_in_city_p.php [http://perma.cc/5HVK-MM9V].
Henry E. Smith, Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields, 29 J. Legal Stud. 131, 135-36 (2000).
Smith notes that community norms and ad hoc adjudications regulated participation. Id. at 136-37. Furthermore, each villager’s plots were scattered throughout the field, making it difficult for any villager strategically to direct the herd to or away from his sometime plot (for example, to avoid having the herd trample the plot during wet weather, or to secure manure to it during the time of year when it would be most valuable). Id. at 146-47, 149. By preventing villagers from exploiting the semicommons structure to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of the community, scattering warded off a prisoner’s dilemma situation. Id. at 146 (“[B]y trying to influence the animals, everyone is at least worse off relative to mutual cooperation to the extent [that he engages in] unproductive efforts, but each farmer is individually better off engaging in such efforts than in refraining from them, regardless of what the others do.”).
Smith’s account implies at one point that the medieval open-field system was spatially hybrid as well as temporally hybrid. Specifically, fallow fields were always open to grazing, and at least some fields were fallow at any given time. Id. at 135. Therefore, the open-field semicommons, like the Connecticut oyster regime, simultaneously encompassed both public and common property areas. However, Smith does not detail interactions between simultaneously existing private and common plots, and, in general, he characterizes the open-field semicommons as temporally hybrid rather than spatially hybrid. See id. at 132 (“In the open-field system, peasants had private property rights to the grain they grew on their individual strips . . . . However, during certain seasons, peasants would be obligated to throw the land open to all the landowners for grazing their animals (especially sheep) in common, under a common herdsman.”); see also Henry E. Smith, Exclusion Versus Governance: Two Strategies for Delineating Property Rights, 31 J. Legal Stud. S453, S480-81 (2002) (describing the medieval open-field semicommons as “a situation in which common property and private property regimes both interact[ed] . . . by physical overlap and temporal interleaving” and as “a system of temporally interleaved rights”).
See, e.g., Abraham Bell & Gideon Parchomovsky, Property Lost in Translation, 80 U. Chi. L. Rev. 515, 525 (2013) (common and private land in pre-colonial Native American villages); Richard A. Epstein, The Allocation of the Commons: Parking on Public Roads, 31 J. Legal Stud. S515, S534-36 (2002) (parking and no-parking zones); Sanne H. Knudsen, Remedying the Misuse of Nature, 2012 Utah L. Rev. 141, 153 (the “patchwork quilt” of private and public land in the contemporary United States); Edella Schlager & Elinor Ostrom, Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis, 68 Land Econ. 249, 257-59 (1992) (open and informally enclosed lobster grounds); Katrina M. Wyman, The Property Rights Challenge in Marine Fisheries, 50 Ariz. L. Rev. 511, 530-31 (2008) (private and public land in the contemporary United States); James Graham Lake, Note, Demsetz Underground: Busking Regulation and the Formation of Property Rights, 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1100, 1102 (2012) (subway stations that allow and do not allow busking).
The most sustained exploration of a spatially hybrid regime is a recent student note. Lake, supra note 46 (arguing that New York City’s regulation of busking in subway stations, in which buskers’ use of busier stations is more strictly controlled, developed because the regulation limits externalities to busking where they are most severe). Elinor Ostrom reviewed an anthropological study of a village property regime incorporating both private and common land, and briefly noted that the distribution corresponded to the productive qualities of the land. See Ostrom, supra note 32, at 62-64.
See, e.g., Lake, supra note 46. Although Lake focuses on efficiency factors, he does speculate that “exogenous legal norms,” such as the First Amendment, were partially responsible for New York’s adoption of a hybrid system rather than a uniform system, and some of the source material he cites suggests that public opinion also prevented New York from adopting a uniformly restrictive system. See id. at 1127-33. However, Lake does not analyze how and to what extent legal norms in fact embodied contemporary political pressures, nor (assuming that they did) why a hybrid regime was a particularly suitable response to these pressures such that it emerged and persisted in lieu of other potential solutions.
Some sources use the terms “spawn” and “spat” interchangeably. See, e.g., Making Oyster Homes: Methods of Work Along the Connecticut Shore, N.Y. Times, Aug. 7, 1892, at 11.
See, e.g., Gordon Sweet, Oyster Conservation in Connecticut: Past and Present, 31 Geographical Rev. 591, 603 (1941).
See, e.g., Kochiss, supra note 51, at 7-8; Oysters and Sewage: A Cheerful Story from New Haven, Hartford Daily Courant, Nov. 19, 1888, at 6.
See, e.g., Kochiss, supra note 51, at 7-8; Destroyed by Star Fish: An Enemy Which Threatens to Exterminate the Oysters, N.Y. Times, Jan. 19, 1889, at 2; The Oysters’ Enemy, Bridgeport Standard, Nov. 20, 1883 (Rowe Scrapbook) [hereinafter The Oysters’ Enemy]; Unidentified newspaper clipping beginning “Few persons not in the trade . . .”, likely from the Sea World (c. 1879) (Rowe Scrapbook) [hereinafter Newspaper clipping beginning “Few persons not in the trade”] (“[A] company of stars . . . will go through an oyster bed sometimes like fire through a forest.”). Here and in subsequent footnotes, I have inferred the dates and/or publication titles of unidentified or incompletely identified primary sources using surrounding sources from the Rowe Scrapbook.
Sources of spat included “brood oysters” placed on the cultivation site, as well as nearby natural beds and planted tracts. See id. at 13; Collins, supra note 3, at 473; Rowe, supra note 1, at 274.
See Edward E. Atwater et al., History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time 615-16 (1887); Kochiss, supra note 51, at 11.
See, e.g., Henry C. Rowe, Letter to the Editor, Monopoly of the Oyster Grounds, New Haven Reg., Aug. 26, 1875 (Rowe Scrapbook) (“. . . I have laid out a considerable sum in attempting to start a crop of oysters on the ground, and have put down fifteen thousand bushels of shells for that purpose, besides seed.”).
See Notes from the Commission, Sea World, Oct. 27, 1879 (Rowe Scrapbook) (“Most of the valuable ground along the shores of Branford, East Haven, New Haven, West Haven, Milford, Stratford, Bridgeport, Norwalk and Darien, is already taken up under existing laws. This is the ground near shore. There are vast extents of deep water ground yet waiting some enterprising cultivators . . . .”). For a fuller discussion of this history, see Part III.B, infra.
Id at 64. Although Ingersoll wrote many years after the events he described took place, an 1867 newspaper article corroborates his description, see The Fair Haven Oyster Trade: The Bivalves from Infancy to Death, Hartford Daily Courant, Sept. 28, 1867, at 1 [hereinafter The Fair Haven Oyster Trade], and an 1887 source assures us that “the old residents pronounce [Ingersoll’s account] quite correct.” Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 614.
Sources differ as to the exact onset of the Chesapeake trade. Compare Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 614 (“about 1823”), with Kochiss, supra note 51, at 15 (“1830 . . . although certain evidence points to 1823 or earlier”), and The Fair Haven Oyster Trade, supra note 88 (“1817”).
See Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 61. As before, much of the production was for export. See, e.g., Oyster Trade at Fairhaven, N.Y. Daily Trib., Jan. 9, 1857, at 6 [hereinafter Oyster Trade at Fairhaven] (“The Hartford and New Haven Railroad are at present running from six to ten cars daily, loaded with oysters, mostly destined for the Western market, though a portion pass up the Connecticut valley and find their way into Canada East.”).
See Thomas W. Merrill & Henry E. Smith, Property: Principles and Policies 312-13 (1st ed. 2007) (noting that underwater land was public property at common law); Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 65 (stating that underwater land was public property in the public opinion).
See An Act in Addition to an Act Entitled “An Act for the Growing of Oysters,” 1845 Conn. Pub. Acts 41-42. In 1846, the law was amended to permit planting native oysters as well as imported seed. See An Act Relating to the Growing of Oysters, 1846 Conn. Pub. Acts 32; Sweet, supra note 58, at 593.
See id. at 112-13; Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 64; Sweet, supra note 58, at 594; The Oyster Interest: Differing Opinions on the Subject of Grants of Oyster Lots, New Haven J.-Courier, Apr. 4, 1878 (Rowe Scrapbook) (“[U]nder the various acts of legislation . . . parties had got persons to put down their names for the limited two acres and assigned them to the one operator. In this way men in the dry goods business . . . and lawyers had had lots marked off, and had assigned them, themselves not knowing or caring anything about oysters or the oyster business.”).
See P. de Broca, On the Oyster-Industries of the United States, in 1873-1875 U.S. Comm’n of Fish & Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner 271, 306.
See An Act in Addition to an Act Entitled “An Act Regulating and Protecting the Planting of Oysters,” 1865 Conn. Pub. Acts 61; An Act in Addition to and in Alteration of “An Act Regulating and Protecting the Planting of Oysters,” 1864 Conn. Pub. Acts 69.
See An Act Regarding the Taking of Oysters, 1848 Conn. Pub. Acts 56-57 (ban on oystering by out-of-state residents); An Act in Addition to an Act Entitled “An Act for the Growing of Oysters,” 1845 Conn. Pub. Acts 42 (nighttime oystering ban); An Act To Promote the Growing of Oysters, 1842 Conn. Pub. Acts 49-50 (off-season). Towns were allowed to opt out of the legislatively imposed off-season, which functioned as a default rule. See An Act To Promote the Growing of Oysters, 1842 Conn. Pub. Acts 50.
See Collins, supra note 3, at 468; Sweet, supra note 58, at 593; see also Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 86 (describing the depletion of the vast natural bed at Bridgeport).
Steam Dredging (c. 1878) (newspaper clipping) (Rowe Scrapbook); see also 1882 Report, supra note 1, at 74 (“A medium-sized sail vessel with three men will dredge up about twenty-five bushels of oysters in a day; while a medium-sized steamer with only one man more will take twenty times as many.”); see also Untitled article beginning “It is said that at the next session . . .”, Bridgeport Farmer, Aug. 25, 1881 (Rowe Scrapbook) [hereinafter Untitled Bridgeport Farmer Article] (equating the productivity of the average steamer with that of thirty-two average sail vessels).
Law-Making in Connecticut: Much Discussion of the Oyster Question, N.Y. Times, Mar. 22, 1881, at 1; see also The Oyster, Hartford Daily Courant, Mar. 16, 1881, at 1 (describing steamers’ advantage in harvesting seed from natural beds).
See, e.g., The Connecticut Oyster Grounds: Report of the Commissioners of the General Assembly, Hartford Post, Feb. 19, 1880 (Rowe Scrapbook) [hereinafter The Connecticut Oyster Grounds].
See, e.g., 1882 Report, supra note 1, at 74 (“For deep-water cultivation steamers are indispensible. They . . . enable the growers to work at times and in places and ways that no sail vessels would attempt . . . .”).
Sound Oyster Growing: Connecticut’s Enterprise in Newly Acquired Territory, N.Y. Sun, Sept. 4, 1881 (Rowe Scrapbook).
See An Act Regulating and Protecting the Planting of Oysters § 3, 1855 Conn. Pub. Acts 112, 113; An Act in Addition to an Act Entitled “An Act for the Growing of Oysters” § 3, 1845 Conn. Pub. Acts 41, 42; Ingersoll, supra note 53, at 64; Sweet, supra note 58, at 594.
See, e.g., Catching Oysters by Steam Power, supra note 1 (“There are very few oyster growers who do a business sufficiently large to afford the heavy outlay of the first cost, and the still more telling one of the constant expense, thus making what may be termed an ‘elephant’ to any dealer not having an immense quantity of oysters to catch up every year.”). Henry Rowe’s first steamer, a sixty-three-foot vessel with three steam engines, four dredges, and a crew of ten, cost $6,500; he acquired a second steamer a few years later at a cost of $9,000. See id.; Newspaper clipping beginning “George N. Graves, of Fair Haven” (c. 1882) (Rowe Scrapbook).
Cf. Libecap, supra note 17, at 53 (discussing a similar situation in the early Western logging industry).
See, e.g., Oyster Grounds, New Haven J.-Courier, June 30, 1876 (Rowe Scrapbook); Troubles of Oystermen, New Haven Union, July 15, 1876 (Rowe Scrapbook); Untitled newspaper clipping beginning “A good deal of trouble is constantly arising . . .”, New Haven J.-Courier, May 6, 1878 (Rowe Scrapbook).
Sound Oyster Growing, supra note 120 (“[T]he plots granted [under the two-acre system] were of all sizes and shapes, run in such irregular lines that a map of them looked like a Chinese puzzle more than anything else, and it must have been almost impossible for dredgers to avoid at times trenching upon the property of their neighbors and thus begetting disputes, reprisals, and law suits.”).
See, e.g., Rowe v. Smith, 48 Conn. 444 (1880). The towns surrounding New Haven harbor—a vital oystering ground divided along numerous uncertain jurisdictional boundaries—resorted to the courts, the legislature, and private negotiation to resolve their disputes, with varying results. See, e.g., Recent Legislation for Protecting Oyster Growers, New Haven Palladium, Apr. 2, 1877 (Rowe Scrapbook); Troubles of Oystermen, supra note 127; Untitled newspaper clipping beginning “A good deal of trouble is constantly arising . . .”, supra note 127. On rising oyster ground values, see, for example, Oyster Grounds, New Haven Palladium, Jan. 24, 1877 (Rowe Scrapbook) (“Lots are said to be worth from $50 to $500 and an acre of oyster grounds from $500 to $1,000—more than the value of a similar area of upland”); and Troubles of Oystermen, supra note 127 (noting that oyster grounds were becoming “more and more valuable”).
See An Act in Alteration of an Act Relating to Oyster Lots and Fisheries § 3, 1879 Conn. Pub. Acts 422, 423 (establishing procedures for boundary dispute resolution); An Act Concerning Fisheries, 1878 Conn. Pub. Acts 273 (clarifying the boundaries of certain towns’ marine jurisdiction); An Act Relating to Oyster Lots and Fisheries § 8, 1878 Conn. Pub. Acts 274, 276 (validating existing grants); An Act Concerning Fisheries § 1, 1877 Conn. Pub. Acts 223, 223 (requiring that all designated oyster grounds be demarcated by personalized stakes or buoys); An Act Amending Sections 21 and 22 of Article 1 of Part 1, Chapter IV, Title 16, of the General Statutes Relating to Fisheries § 2, 1875 Conn. Pub. Acts 14, 14 (regulating dredging in East Haven); An Act Relating to Fisheries for Shell-fish in Tide-Waters and Rivers, 1875 Conn. Pub. Acts 14 (validating existing grants).
The southern jurisdictional boundaries of the coastal towns, past which the state would exercise sole jurisdiction, were apparently undefined during this time but were assumed to exist somewhere. See, e.g., Oyster Legislation, supra note 1. State laws passed during this period gave New Haven and Orange special permission to grant deep water beds, but other towns also made grants without such permission. See, e.g., The Connecticut Oyster Grounds, supra note 118.
See The Steam Dredge Bill, supra note 1; see also Oyster Legislation, supra note 1 (describing Rowe’s prodigious lobbying efforts).
See An Act Regulating the Dredging for Shell-fish by Steam Power, 1880 Conn. Pub. Acts 544; see also Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 620 (discussing Rowe’s success in obtaining dredging legislation).
For a sense of the lobbying war leading up to the 1881 reforms, see, for example, Connecticut’s Proposed Oyster Laws, Feb. 1880 (otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping) (Rowe Scrapbook); Law-Making in Connecticut, supra note 115; Oyster Legislation, supra note 1; The Order of the Day, Apr. 5, 1881 (publication name illegible) (Rowe Scrapbook); The Steam Dredge Bill, supra note 1; Untitled newspaper clipping beginning “The following is the speech of Capt. C. W. Hoyt . . .”, Conn. Republican, Mar. 12, 1881 (Rowe Scrapbook); Charles W. Bell et al., ­Answer to Statements Made by Mr. Henry C. Rowe in his Circular Entitled “Ought the Steam-Dredge Bill to Pass?” (1881) (unpublished circular) (Rowe Scrapbook); Petition from advocates of steam power (Jan. 31, 1879) (Rowe Scrapbook); Reasons Why the “Act Establishing a State Commission for Designation of Oyster Grounds,” Being File No. 314, Ought Not to Pass (1881) (anonymous unpublished circular) (Rowe Scrapbook); and Henry C. Rowe, Ought the Steam Dredge Bill to Pass? (Jan. 1881) (unpublished circular) (Rowe Scrapbook).
See Concerning Raising of Oysters, 1879 Conn. Spec. Acts 128 (establishing the Commission); The Connecticut Oyster Grounds, supra note 118 (concluding that under the system of town jurisdiction, “laws [were] diverse and conflicting, and their administration [was], to the last degree, loose and inefficient”).
An Act Establishing a State Commission for the Designation of Oyster Grounds § 3, 1881 Conn. Pub. Acts 100, 101.
See An Act To Regulate Dredging with Sail Vessels on Natural Oyster Beds, 1881 Conn. Pub. Acts 87; An Act Concerning Shell Fisheries, 1881 Conn. Pub. Acts 58; An Act Regulating the Dredging for Shell Fish and Shells, 1881 Conn. Pub. Acts 58.
See An Act Establishing a State Commission for the Designation of Oyster Grounds, 1881 Conn. Pub. Acts 100.
See 1882 Report, supra note 1, at 70 (“The natural beds are by law common property, and are free to all.”).
Change in Oyster Laws, supra note 126. Henry Rowe claimed that natural growthers had “dredged some of the public beds so persistently that the oysters are caught before they are the size of the thumb-nail, and as one of them testified before the fisheries committee, he thought it ‘lucky to get enough big oysters for a stew’ in all day.” Henry C. Rowe, Letter to the Editor, A Great Revolution, Hartford Daily Courant, Apr. 1, 1884, at 1-2. Scholars have empirically confirmed that modern public oyster beds tend to be less efficient at producing oysters than privately owned beds. See sources cited supra note 6.
See, e.g., Henry C. Rowe, Rowe Refutes Bell: The State Association Vindicated, New Haven Palladium, Mar. 24, 1884 (Rowe Scrapbook); The Foe of the Oyster: The Fish Commission To Study the Starfish Problem, N.Y. Times, Jul. 15, 1889, at 3.
Fish Comm’rs & Shell Fish Comm’rs of the State of Conn, Third Report of the Shell Fish Commissioners: State of Connecticut 13 (1884) [hereinafter 1884 Report]. The commissioners also noted numerous reports that natural growthers threw starfish caught in dredges back onto the beds rather than destroying them. See id. at 12-13; see also The Oysters’ Enemy, supra note 60 (corroborating these reports). Larger cultivators, on the other hand, employed boats exclusively to remove starfish from their properties. See, e.g., 1884 Report, supra, at 12; The Hungry Starfish, N.Y. Times, June 11, 1886, at 1.
Developing the Oyster Industry (c. 1880) (otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping) (Rowe Scrapbook).
Oyster Farming: Results Accomplished by the Connecticut Laws, Baltimore Sun, July 23, 1892, at 8 [hereinafter Oyster Farming].
See, e.g., The Oyster Commission, New Haven J.-Courier, Sept. 12, 1882 (Rowe Scrapbook); The Stratford Grounds: A New Boundary Fixed for the Natural Oyster Beds, New Haven Evening Reg., Aug. 23, 1882 (Rowe Scrapbook) (“Mr. Rowe said this afternoon that although he suffered severely he should accept the decision if the others did.”).
See, e.g., Appeal of Keister, 92 A. 744 (Conn. 1914); State v. Bassett, 29 A. 471 (Conn. 1894); State v. Nash, 25 A. 451 (Conn. 1892); In re Application of the Oyster-Ground Comm. of Clinton, 52 Conn. 5 (1884); May Work Natural Oyster Beds: A Decision of a Connecticut Court Which Has Brought Joy to Poor Oystermen on Long Island Sound, N.Y. Times, Nov. 28, 1894, at 3 [hereinafter May Work Natural Oyster Beds]; Natural Oyster Beds: Attorney-General Phelps Advises the Shell-Fish Commissioners, Hartford Daily Courant, Nov. 9, 1899, at 7.
Cf. Rieser, supra note 6, at 52 (speculating that “proposed community-based property rights in oyster beds might have fared better” than “privatization proposals” in preserving Chesapeake oysters).
Cf. Libecap, supra note 17, at 66 (explaining that the nineteenth-century property regime for federal timber and range lands failed to evolve, despite its inefficiency, in part because “aggregate losses of common pool conditions . . . were not immediate or large enough to offset distributional conflicts and convince politicians of the political gains from changing the land laws”).
As Smith has noted, such mechanisms are particularly important in semicommons regimes, where the coexistence of private and public property creates opportunities for strategic, selective degradation of the commons. See supra notes 44-45 and accompanying text.
Cf. Acheson, supra note 30 (describing self-help exclusion measures in the Maine lobster fishery). As I have described, there were also formal restrictions to the same end. The most consequential regulation was the steamboat ban, but other laws, such as the seasonal restriction, the dredge weight restriction, the ban on oystering by out-of-state residents, and catch limits imposed on specific areas, also posed barriers to entry and slowed exploitation. See supra Part III.
A Little Oyster War: The Quiet Serenity of Stratford and Milford Disturbed, Hartford Daily Courant, Aug. 28, 1890, at 1; see also Oystermen at War: Bridgeport Fishers Take the Law into Their Own Hands, N.Y. Times, Aug. 27, 1890, at 1 (reporting that Smith’s boat “mysteriously disappeared” and the sails of another boat were cut).
See id.; cf. Ostrom, supra note 33, at 147 (discussing the “crowding out” of informal governance by formal law). Fitzpatrick argues that this dynamic underlies dysfunctional resource regimes in many developing countries. See Fitzpatrick, supra note 18, at 1000-01.
For other accounts of how natural resource biology helps shape property regimes, see Robert C. Ellickson, A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry, 5 J. L. Econ. & Org. 83, 89-92 (1989); and Dean Lueck, The Extermination and Conservation of the American Bison, 31 J. Legal Stud. S609, S641-44 (2002).
Newspaper clipping beginning “Few persons not in the trade,” supra note 60; see also Notes from the Commission, supra note 72 (“It seems generally true that the people from the back country have a much better chance of securing a few bushels of oysters now near shore, because of the appropriation of waters by the cultivators. There are more oysters and more get within their reach, or where they can get them without a boat. They wash ashore from the beds, and the seed spreads to all the adjacent grounds.”).
Notably, according to the state commissioners’ statistics, the acreage of major natural beds actually expanded during the late 1800s. Between 1881 and 1894, the Bridgeport bed nearly tripled in size. See Kochiss, supra note 51, at 155. Some of this expansion derived from redefinition of the boundaries of the bed, see, e.g., The Stratford Grounds: A New Boundary Fixed for the Natural Oyster Beds, supra note 148, but it is reasonable to assume that at least some of it was caused by accretion. Moreover, the natural beds continued to produce copious amounts of oysters during this period. The Bridgeport bed alone was capable of producing over 100,000 seed oysters in a good year, Collins, supra note 3, at 491, and in 1899 it yielded 400,000 bushels—roughly ten percent of the state’s total yield of oysters. Galpin, supra note 66, at 30. In 1887, 1888, and 1889, the natural beds produced fifteen, twelve, and five percent of the total volume of oysters harvested in Connecticut, respectively. These percentages are derived from figures reported in Collins, supra note 3, at 490-91.
See 1882 Report, supra note 1, at 61; Kochiss, supra note 51, at 154; Collins, supra note 3, at 478-79 (describing private seed cultivators); Sweet, supra note 58, at 597.
See Long Island Oyster Beds: Development of the Connecticut Planting Industry—Enemies of the Oyster, Baltimore Sun, Aug. 2, 1886, at 5 [hereinafter Long Island Oyster Beds].
See, e.g., The Fair Haven Oyster Trade, supra note 88 (noting that native seed was “said to make the best oysters in the country”); For Four Days: Adjournment of the Legislature, New Haven Palladium, Mar. 23, 1883 (Rowe Scrapbook); Long Island Oyster Beds, supra note 169.
Kochiss, supra note 51, at 154 (noting that most Connecticut seed was produced on private grounds, but that “much of the best came from the state’s and towns’ natural beds”); Audio tape: Interview with James Fletcher Lewis by John Kochiss (Mar 6, 1968) (on file with the G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport) [hereinafter Lewis Interview] (discussing the superior form of natural bed oysters).
See, e.g., Long Island Oyster Beds, supra note 169; Notes from the Commission, supra note 72 (“Norwalk and Darien planters think the natural beds are the nurseries of their industry there.”); The Enemy of the Oyster: A Successful Device for Capturing and Destroying the Starfish, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 23, 1890, at 3 [hereinafter The Enemy of the Oyster]; Unidentified newspaper clipping beginning “The catch of seed oysters . . .” (c. 1882) (Rowe Scrapbook).
Oystermen Rejoice in the Season’s Big “Set”: Biggest Crop of Baby Bivalves for Four Years, N.Y. Times, Aug. 28, 1904, at FS4. Another account claims that the Bridgeport bed produced 500,000 bushels of seed in 1880, and that some ninety percent of this seed was planted in Connecticut waters. Unidentified newspaper clipping beginning “It was attempted to be shown that . . .” (c. 1881) (Rowe Scrapbook).
For example, in 1890, over 200 boats, each with two or three crewmembers, worked the Bridgeport and Stratford beds; notably, state statistics indicated that 1,024 men were employed in the fishery as a whole the prior year. See Fish Comm’rs & Shell Fish Comm’rs of the State of Conn., Annual Report of the Shell-Fish Commissioners: State of Connecticut 14 (1891) [hereinafter 1891 Report]; The Enemy of the Oyster, supra note 172. And in 1903, a bad year, the Hartford Daily Courant reported that “[t]he interests of about 600 men [were] unfavorably affected” by adverse conditions on the bed. No Oyster Set About Bridgeport, Hartford Daily Courant, Aug. 24, 1903, at 9.
See, e.g., Notes from the Commission, supra note 72 (“As it is a comparatively recent thing for ground in the sea to be set aside to private owners, many have the idea that somehow their rights are being taken from them.”).
See Town Meeting in Guilford (c. 1877) (otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping) (Rowe Scrapbook).
George Santopietro and Leonard Shabman have argued that the distributional, social, and quality-of-life characteristics of the Chesapeake natural bed system ought to be taken into account in evaluating that system’s efficiency, because they produce “nonmonetary, intangible benefits . . . like worker satisfaction bonus and community preservation” that oystermen value highly. George D. Santopietro & Leonard A. Shabman, Can Privatization Be Inefficient?: The Case of the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fishery, 26 J. Econ. Issues 407, 413-15 (1992). I agree but focus here on the political dimensions of such intangibles rather than attempting to incorporate them into an efficiency analysis.
By 1881, the cultivators had formed an official Oyster Growers’ Association. See 1882 Report, supra note 1, at 54 (describing “[t]he Oyster Growers’ Association, comprising most of the prominent men in deep-water cultivation . . .”). They were energetic advocates both in Hartford and in the press. See, e.g., Rowe, supra note 143; Monopoly of the Oyster Grounds, supra note 70; Oyster Legislation, supra note 1. The Association entertained legislators, regulators, and other notables with steamer cruises in New Haven harbor. See, e.g., Oysters as a Crop, Hartford Daily Courant, Sept. 2, 1885, at 1; Untitled Bridgeport Farmer Article, supra note 114.
See, e.g., Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War 11-18 (1970) (discussing the Republican party’s ideological affinity toward hard work and small-scale entrepreneurship during the mid-1800s); Libecap, supra note 17, at 67 (noting that the late 1800s saw “a new sense of pessimism and a perceived narrowing of opportunities”).
See, e.g., Big Oyster Syndicate, Hartford Daily Courant, Jan. 19, 1898, at 11; Oyster Syndicate Collapses, Hartford Daily Courant, June 16, 1900, at 2; Talk of Oyster Syndicate, Hartford Daily Courant, Nov. 8, 1898, at 11. Few, if any, of these schemes seem to have succeeded.
See, e.g., Monopoly of the Oyster Grounds, supra note 70; New Haven Oyster Grounds, Hartford Times, Aug. 26, 1875 (Rowe Scrapbook); Town Meeting in Guilford, supra note 181.
See, e.g., May Work Natural Oyster Beds, supra note 149 (“There is great rejoicing among the oystermen along the Sound over the decision of Judge Downs of Stamford . . . . The decision is in favor of the hundreds of sturdy oystermen who own little sloops, and make a living by hard work spent on the natural oyster beds along the Sound. It is also a rebuke to those who have an idea that the waters of Long Island Sound belong to them, and establishes the fact that people cannot be deprived of their rights of gaining a livelihood.”); Town Meeting in Guilford, supra note 181.
See Atwater et al., supra note 69, at 613-14; see also Town Meeting in Guilford, supra note 181 (reporting on a comment from “one of Guilford’s young citizens” at a town meeting that “in an adjoining village I am told that a poor man cannot catch even a meal of clams upon the shore”); Notes from the Commission, supra note 72 (“The Norwalk growers . . . think a public ground should be reserved . . . [f]or the poor, who are unable to own ground for themselves.”).
See, e.g., Kochiss, supra note 51, at 159; Collins, supra note 3, at 463; For Four Days: Adjournment of the Legislature, supra note 170 (“The catch on Fridays [is] generally carried home on Saturdays by the boatmen and planted on their own grounds, while the catch during the balance of the week was sold to boatmen who came around for the purpose.”).
See Steam Dredging, Meriden Republican, Mar. 31, 1881 (Rowe Scrapbook). Although the debate discussed in this editorial concerned legislation on the use of steam, rather than privatization, the lobbies against steam and against privatization both consisted of small-scale oystermen.
Oystermen Will Vote: A Factor of Importance in the Coming Connecticut Election, N.Y. Times, Nov. 1, 1891, at 9. The article also claimed that “[i]t is an open secret that the vote of the oystermen last year went a great way toward electing R. E. De Forest Congressman from this district.” Id. It estimated the number of Connecticut oystermen at 3,000, which seems high. See 1891 Report, supra note 178, at 14 (noting that there were 1,024 men employed in the industry for the year ending May 1, 1889).
This is not to say, of course, that such regimes will invariably emerge. The history of oystering in other states shows as much. See sources cited supra note 4. A comparative analysis of the evolution of property law in the various oystering states is beyond the scope of this Note, but it is worth briefly speculating as to why, for example, a stable hybrid regime did not emerge during this period in the famously restive Chesapeake oyster industry. See Michael W. Fincham, The Oyster Dreams of W.K. Brooks, Chesapeake Q., Apr. 2013, at 14, http://www.chesapeakequarterly.net/V12N1/main3 [http://perma.cc/Z95W-BJN7] (arguing that in Maryland, “anti-leasing forces would manage to cripple every pro-farming initiative attempted, both through political power and poaching, not just during [the late 1800s] but during the next 130 years”); Gillis, supra note 4; see also Oyster Farming, supra note 147 (a Baltimore newspaper’s admiring account of the Connecticut system). Topography may have played a role. Being largely shallow and suitable for wild oyster growth, the Chesapeake may not have had areas that were not associated in the public mind with open access (akin to the deep water tracts of the Sound) and that therefore could be turned over to private growers with comparatively less political blowback. See Facts & Figures, Chesapeake Bay Program (2012), http://www.chesapeakebay.net/discover/bay101/facts [http://perma.cc/7768-TFKH] (noting that the Chesapeake is generally shallow). The jurisdictional complexity of the Chesapeake, which is split between two states, may also have complicated negotiation toward a grand bargain along the lines of Connecticut’s 1881 reforms, and the state’s political structure may have also conspired against compromise. See Fincham, supra, at 14 (noting that Maryland’s method of geographic apportionment of political representatives disproportionately empowered anti-enclosure forces).
See, e.g., Courtney B. Johnson, Advances in Marine Spatial Planning: Zoning Earth’s Last Frontier, 29 J. Envtl. L. & Litig. 191 (2014); Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of the Interior, Secretary Jewell, Governor Patrick Announced the Nation’s Largest Offshore Wind Energy Area Available for Commercial Development (June 17, 2014), http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/secretary-jewell-governor-patrick-to-announce-nations-largest-offshore-wind-energy-area-available-for-commercial-development.cfm [http://perma.cc/EV4Y-A6T6].
See, e.g., Adam Vann, Cong. Research Serv., R40806, Energy Projects on Federal Lands: Leasing and Authorization 1-2 (2012), http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40806.pdf [http://perma.cc/CC64-N6W9]. See generally Bruce R. Huber, The Durability of Private Claims to Public Property, 102 Geo. L.J. 991 (2014) (exploring the diversity of private activity on federal land).

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