Kirsten Sellars has published A ‘Constitution for the Oceans': The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Cambridge University Press):
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in 1982, was the culmination of half a century of legal endeavour. Earlier attempts to create a treaty regime governing the oceans – at League of Nations and United Nations conferences held in 1930, 1958 and 1960 – had all failed to settle the breadth of the territorial sea, and in two cases failed to settle anything at all. During the negotiations, legal concepts were formulated and reformulated: straight baselines inspired archipelagic baselines; fishing conservation zones became exclusive economic zones; innocent passage through straits metamorphosed into transit passage through straits; and seabed common heritage was replaced by the parallel system of seabed exploitation. Many of the issues that animated the delegates during the negotiations – ocean pollution, overfishing, naval mobility, continental shelf claims and the impact of seabed mining – continue to exercise policymakers and lawyers to this day.
--Dan Ernst
