This book is divided into two parts. Although the author does not quite set it out in this fashion, the aim of the first part is to demonstrate that the delimitation of maritime boundaries ought to be governed by the application of an “equidistance-special circumstance” rule. The author examines the background to the delimitation provisions in the 1958 Geneva Conventions and then considers the interpretation put upon Art. 6 of the Continental Shelf Convention in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases. He believes that the court failed to appreciate that the equidistance rule found in Art. 6 of that Convention was not a rule of strict application, to be modified only if justified by the presence of some “special circumstances”, but that it was, from the outset, intended to be a flexible amalgam. He does admit that the actual language of the text implies a hierarchical relationship but argues that “there was no necessity to be bound by the precise language of the Article itself. A more creative, and legitimate, approach might have been for the Court to extract the unified rule of ‘equidistance-special circumstances’ from the intention of the drafters …” (p. 63). Although this is exactly what was done by the Court of Arbitration in the Anglo-French case,