Straight Baselines in International Law: A Call for Reconsideration

Abstract

At Yale for the last two years, I've been working with Professor Gayl Westerman, sitting here on my right, who is a professor at Pace University School of Law and holds a doctorate from Yale on maritime boundaries. In the course of the last year, we have become more and more concerned with the complete deterioration of any disciplined regime with regard to baselines, and it has become quite apparent that the consequences are very deleterious for any effective public order of the oceans. We have been doing some work on this, and it seemed that it would be appropriate to present it to a group of experts in international law in general and specialists in international maritime law in particular, to see what the reactions might be. I know that many of you here are concerned with this problem in a professional or scholarly fashion, and I know that some of you share the concerns that Gayl Westerman and I have. The seminar might proceed best if I were given 25 or 30 minutes to set out the basic thesis of our concern, and perhaps a brief bibliographical review for those of you who are working on this, and then try to move our discussion on to an inquiry into a variety of problems that we think, as yet, are unresolved.