Opinions o f the Attorneys General 43

those waters. It is my personal opinion, therefore,
that the State of Virginia has no jurisdiction to en
force the slot machine statute on the waters of the
Potomac River.

 This latter opinion is interesting for two reasons. First,
 the Virginia Attorney General accepted the reasoning of
 the Court in the Hendricks case, decided in 1882 by the
 Virginia Court of Appeals. Secondly, his statement that
 Virginia has no general criminal jurisdiction over the
 Potomac River is in accord with the holdings of the Mary
 land Court of Appeals in the Biscoe and Barnes cases.

VI. CURRENT PROBLEMS OF ENFORCEMENT

 Problems of enforcement in the waters over which
 Maryland and Virginia have concurrent jurisdiction have
 persisted throughout the history of the Compact of 1785.
 At the present time Maryland is faced with an especially
 pressing situation in the Potomac River, the solution to
 which has not thus far been found.

 The crux of the problem is that illegal dredging opera
 tions in the Potomac are seriously depleting the supply of
 oysters, and Maryland officials are claiming that most of
 the boats engaged in dredging are based upon the Virginia
 shore, with seemingly little effort upon the part of Virginia
 authorities to enforce the laws.

 About twenty years ago, and probably in considerable
 part because of the dredging operations which then were
 legal, the supply of oysters in the Potomac River became
 very low. A survey of the oyster bars in late 1928, by the
 United States Bureau of Fisheries, showed in its conclu
 sions that either the supply remaining on most of the
 bars was "poor" or that the bar was "denuded" of oysters.'
 Subsequently, in an effort to restore the River, the two
 states in 1931 agreed by concurrent statutes to forbid

 1 The results of this survey, and also an account of the recent history of relations between
the two states is in Swepson Earle's Potomac River Oyster and Fish Survey (1931).