This volume is concerned with the delimitation of the outer limits and baselines of zones of maritime jurisdiction, and the drawing of the boundaries of such zones between opposite or adjacent states.

The book, as the authors are at pains to emphasize, is “intended primarily for hydrographers, cartographers and geographers, people who are more familiar with the chart and parallel ruler than they are with a legal term”. Nevertheless, they acknowledge that no account of maritime boundary delimitation would be possible without a discussion of the international law on the subject. Accordingly, it is perhaps not unfair for an international lawyer to review the account of the law given by the authors, and to comment on the utility of their technical, hydrographic, etc., exposition to a lawyer who is interested in this subject.

On both accounts, the volume is something of a disappointment.

So far as concerns their account of the law, it is inevitably rather compressed in a book of this compass. Thus, only eight pages are devoted to the sources of international law, the early history of the law of the sea and its codification. Less excusably, there are inaccuracies in the exposition of the law or the facts in other parts of the book. For instance, in the Anglo-Norwegian Fisheries Case (1951), what Norway was claiming was not an exclusive fisheries zone of four miles, but a territorial sea of that breadth. The treatment of the effect of islands within bays at pp. 46–48 is not very clear and appears to be based on a misunderstanding. Similarly, there is an error or misprint in the otherwise helpful figure (fig. 18) discussing the outer limit of the continental shelf under Art. 76 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea; and the accompanying text is not very clear. The discussion of the regime of bays at pp. 42 et seq. is somewhat inadequate; in particular, there is no discussion of the case law.

Your reviewer had hoped that at any rate the technical review of geodetic, hydrographic, cartographic and geological factors in Chapter 2 would prove of assistance to the lawyer who needs to apply the rules to specific cases. Unfortunately, the exposition is too compressed and elliptical to be of very much use. There are some helpful charts and diagrams, but Nos. 5, 16 and 19 are too faint to be of much use, and the explanation accompanying fig. 33 (on the Italy-Tunisia delimitation) is quite inadequate.

Comparisons will inevitably be made with competing publications. In particular, though it