The title of this book is misleading. Faced with such a title, the reader might legitimately expect an examination or evaluation of the concept of the Common Heritage of Mankind, but that is not its purpose. The sub-title—The United States Position on the Development of a Regime for Deep Sea-Bed Mining in the Law of the Sea Convention—is also misleading on two counts. First, it suggests that the book will examine the attitude of the U.S. to the deep sea-bed regime as found in Part XI of the Law of the Sea Convention. Although this is indeed done, and done well, it is not the main thrust of the work. Secondly, and more significantly, it implies that there was a “United States position” on this issue. The author himself seems to give the lie to this impression: what the book is chiefly about is the domestic political and bureaucratic background to the developing U.S. position concerning deep sea-bed mining and its impact upon UNCLOS III.

If such criticism seems merely pedantic, it must be borne in mind that, as the author says, the purpose of the book is “primarily descriptive and only secondarily analytical and prescriptive” and it is as a descriptive work that it must be considered. One might regret this, since, given the impressive scope of the research that underpins this book, one feels that the author would have been able to develop some penetrating insights into the substance of the United States’ position. On some controversial issues, the absence of even the most provisional conclusion in the wake of intelligent expositions of issues is often disappointing to the reader and, one sometimes feels, only achieved by an unwarranted exercise in self-control on the part of the author.

The book falls into four sections (although it is not formally divided in this way). The first three chapters consider the background to the interest in deep sea-bed mining and the competing legal frameworks within which it might take place, including the ultimate emergence of the 1981 United States legislation, and an examination of the “line up of actors” within the U.S., their interests, role and influences. This is possibly the most successful part of the book, confident and informative in highlighting the diverse range of influences under which policy was formed and developed.

The second section, Chapters 4–6, looks at the position(s) of the U.S. in the negotiations in Committee One. As an exercise in itself, this is interesting and informative. The world of the negotiations, however, seems to drift apart from the world of the first three chapters and the influence of the one upon the other is not always brought out. This, in part, may well be, however, because there was no such interaction during the Carter/Richardson years. If the book has a central thesis, it is that the Reagan review was less of a radical shift in policy and more of a realignment of the negotiating stance with prevailing attitudes, though heightened