It is hardly possible to overstate the importance of this massive work. The International Court of Justice has produced more judgments concerning maritime boundary delimitation than on any other single subject. There have also been several significant cases heard by arbitral tribunals. This trend is set to continue. In just about all of these cases, parties have sought to support their various arguments by reference to an ever increasing body of state practice. This publication provides the definitive collection of delimitation agreements and will be the first—and possibly the final—resource drawn upon in the future for these and other purposes. Moreover, the work provides a wealth of useful information that will be of great benefit to those engaged in future inter-state boundary negotiations, as well as to those commentators who do not feel so utterly dispirited by the sheer volume of material now made so readily accessible that they decide to give up in despair.

The work is carefully constructed and examines the agreements from both a regional and thematic perspective. Ten regions are identified and, in separate sections, all the known agreements relating to each region are examined in separate “Reports” which examine each agreement and include its text and an illustrative map. Regional summaries draw the regional practice together. In addition, nine substantive issues are identified. These provide the template against which every agreement is examined. The work commences with nine chapters which, drawing upon all the Reports, attempt to draw some general conclusions regarding the chosen themes. Each region and thematic examination is conducted by an acknowledged expert. As a result, the resulting list of contributors reads like something of a “who’s who” of maritime boundary studies.

The regional divisions are fairly self-evident: North America (Alexander), Middle America and Caribbean (Nweihed), South America (Jiménez de Aréchaga), Africa (Adede), Central Pacific/East Asia (Park), the Indian Ocean and South East Asia (Prescott), the Persian Gulf (Peitrowski and Alexander), the Mediterranean and Black Seas (Scovazzi), Northern and Western Europe (Anderson) and the Baltic Sea (Franckx). The inclusion of the last as a separate region might strike some as surprising, but is justifiable on the basis of the all but complete state of the maritime boundaries within it. It must be said that there is some unevenness between the way in which each regional author has conducted the work. In part, this simply reflects the relative complexities of the regions but it is noticeable that the individual Reports concerning Middle/Central America and Central Pacific/East Asia are, for example, noticeably fuller than those relating to South America. In general, most of the regional analyses suffer from being either too brief or merely repetitive of what is said in the conclusion to each Report (that of Northern and Western Europe and of the Baltic being notable exceptions). This is, perhaps, the most disappointing aspect of this work.

The substantive themes adopted as the tools for analysis and exposition are wide ranging. They cover (1) Political, Strategic and Historical Considerations (Oxman), (2) Legal Regime Considerations (Colson), (3) Economic and Environmental Considerations (Kwiatkowska), (4) Geographic Considerations (Weil), (5) Islands, Rocks, Reefs and Low-Tide Elevations Considerations (Bowett), (6) Baseline Considerations (Sohn), (7) Geological and Geomorphological Considerations (Highet), (8) Method of Delimitation Considerations (Legault and Hankey), (9) Technical Considerations (Beazley). These introductory essays are noteworthy in their own right and are significant contributions to the study of delimitation practice. There is, however, a danger in seeking to extract too much from state practice. For