A list of the achievements of international environmental law would undoubtedly include the survival and recovery of the great whales (a process of recovery that has taken place, ironically, under a treaty designed to guarantee the continued exploitability of whales). A list of the failures of international environmental law would likely include the increasingly fragile state of most other pelagic stocks (a process of decline and mismanagement that has taken place under the auspices of regional treaties designed to maintain the sustainability of covered species). As with northern cod in 1991, the road to stock collapse has been paved with good projections.

This record may suggest to the unconverted that the only applicable law in regard to fisheries is the law of unintended consequences. But that would be a mistake. In the more than fifty years since the adoption of the Third Geneva Convention of 1958, international law and international institutions have been a significant force, for good or ill – and this even though the number of contentious cases concerning the merits of fishery conservation measures can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Instead, the world's pelagic fisheries are managed through some thirty regional fisheries organizations (RFOs) under the general auspices of the Fish Stocks Agreement and Articles 116–120 of UNCLOS. Margaret Young's splendid study is based on the premiss – surely correct – that there is ‘greater scope for international lawyers to contribute understanding and ideas about collaboration and cohesion within these [fishery] regimes, rather than focussing on ex post rules determining priority in later disputes’.