Ocean Law Debates: The 50-Year Legacy and Emerging Issues for the Years Ahead offers historical perspectives on the ocean-law debates of the 1960s and after, leading to the signing of UNCLOS in 1982, along with perceptive analyses of various key current-day issues, including climate change, biodiversity in the Area Beyond National Jurisdiction, seabed mining, genetic prospecting, and the geopolitics of Marine Protected Areas.

Sixteen authoritative yet eminently readable chapters offer analyses of major issues in the interfaces of science, technology, and law for the oceans. This volume fills an important gap both in the existing literature on law of the sea and in the more comprehensive field of ocean resource-use studies.

A history of international law in public debates and its resulting popular language of international law.

This book analyses a selection of challenges in the implementation and application of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), focusing on several areas: international organizations, fisheries, security, preserving marine biodiversity, dispute settlement, and interaction with other areas of international law. UNCLOS has been described as the Constitution for the Oceans. It sets out the fundamental rights, obligations and jurisdictions of States regarding the access to, uses and management of the oceans and seas and their resources. It balances States’ diverse and sometimes conflicting interests, such as conflicting uses of space, against navigational interests and the protection of the marine environment. UNCLOS is the first global treaty to include comprehensive obligations on the protection and preservation of the marine environment, including the conservation of living marine resources. These are often common or cross-border challenges, which can only be addressed through international cooperation. The book is divided into three thematic parts. The first concerns the role of international organizations in ocean governance. It includes twelve chapters covering a very diverse set of issues, both materially and geographically, that demonstrate the importance of coordinated actions on the part of multiple States for obtaining harmonized solutions regarding the pursuit of activities in maritime spaces (in connection with e.g. navigation, fisheries or maritime security). The second part concerns the relevance of dispute settlement mechanisms for understanding the international law of the sea and the international legal framework within which the actions of the great maritime powers take place. It is composed of three chapters, examining stakeholders’ role in dispute settlement, the position taken by China and the Russian Federation regarding international litigation in maritime spaces, and how the South China Sea Award may be relevant to the debate on the international legal concepts of rock and island. In turn, the third part addresses current discussions on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. Its seven chapters report on the status quo of the ongoing negotiations for a new international legal regime of the high seas, and the establishment and operationalization of environmental regimes for international maritime spaces.

The United States and Canada are salt water neighbors on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Despite the general closeness of the political, economic and social relationship, the two States have approached their offshore areas from different perspectives. Canada has long supported expansion of exclusive national control over its adjacent offshore; whereas the United States has been concerned with the balance between national authority and international navigation rights. Canada has tended to view maritime disputes with the United States as local matters; whereas the United States has tended to see the disputes with Canada in global terms. Against this background, Salt Water Neighbor's examines both the international ocean law disagreements that exist between the United States and Canada respecting maritime boundaries, fisheries and navigation rights (e.g., the Northwest Passage) and the numerous cooperative bilateral arrangements that have prevented these disputes from being significant causes of friction between the neighbors. There has not been a comprehensive book-length study of United States-Canada international ocean relations since the early 1970s. Much has changed in the last 30 years. Most importantly, the law and the nature of the disputes between the two States have changed as a result of the adoption of 200 nautical mile zones in the late 1970s.

The Center for Oceans Law and Policy, University of Virginia School of Law, annually hosts a conference on a topical subject of interest to the global law of the sea community. The twenty-fifth meeting of the Center was co-sponsored by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and held in March 2001, at its Hamburg headquarters. The conference theme, Current Marine Environmental Issues and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, featured two days of presentations from many of the world's foremost experts. The published conference proceedings include papers by Satya N. Nandan, Secretary-General, International Seabed Authority; P. Chandrasekhara Rao, President, ITLOS; most of the ITLOS judges; and a number of private practitioners concerned with the marine environment. Topics discussed focused on the past, present, and future dispute settlement activities of ITLOS and the regulatory consequences in Europe as a result of the Erika oil spill on 12 December, 1999. Current Marine Environmental Issues and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea is a significant collection of authoritative commentary, compiled through the cooperation of an academic institution and an international organization specifically dedicated to peaceful settlement of disputes in the world's oceans.

The public trust doctrine. Role of the states. Managing coastal development. National environmental policy act ...