The Vietnam “war” was fought to preserve the balance of power between the non-Communist and Communist worlds. To the extent the global power equation ever rested on the outcome of that struggle, it cannot be judged a success for our side. In the process, however, another balance has also been altered, perhaps far more significantly: that between Congress and the Presidency in the conduct of foreign relations. Some would say that the Administration’s failure to win in Vietnam, together with the backwash of Watergate, created the opportunity for a long overdue redress in the constitutional balance of power between the branches. Others argue that the result has been to cripple the Executive’s ability to respond to the challenges of our era and to perform America’s role as leader of the free world. None would deny that the rules relating to the conduct of foreign relations have been fundamentally altered or restored to something nearer the classic intent of the Constitution’s framers.

This article examines one of the recurring problems in the law of the sea—the treatment of islands in the delimitation of the continental shelf between opposite and adjacent states—in light of developments at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, in particular, the adoption of “equitable principles” as the standard for delimitation of the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone between adjacent and opposite states. On the assumption that the content of these equitable principles may be derived from contemporary state practice in maritime delimitations, this state practice is used as a basis for the construction of an analytical model of the continental shelf problem of islands. This model relies primarily on an island's relative location and secondarily on its relative size with respect to the delimiting states. It provides a framework for determining how an island should be treated in a given delimitation. Though the model is, out of necessity, based upon state practice in continental shelf delimitations, the premises underlying the model are not so limited and thus the general principles derived from this analysis will have an important bearing on the new problem of the delimitation of the exclusive economic zone.

With the arrival of the British Army in August 1969, in aid of the civil power, intercommunal strife in Northern Ireland entered a new phase, which saw the regeneration of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the emergence of a guerrilla conflict between the IRA and British Army. In the first half of 1971, 8 civilians, 10 soldiers, and 2 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had been killed; 454 civilians, 110 soldiers, and 71 policemen had been injured. In July 1971 alone, traditionally a period of acute tension, there had been 86 explosions, 2 soldiers had been shot dead, and 21 persons injured. It was this rising tide of violence that set the scene for the introduction of internment without trial on August 9, 1971.

The combined forces of science and technology have been perfecting a new means of data acquisition which has gone largely unnoticed by the average citizen—a technique so profound in its implications for the improvement of the environment and for the allocation and conservation of natural and human resources that it has been compared to the microscope in its significance and achievement. This new technique is the viewing of the earth’s surface and its surrounding environment by means of sensing devices affixed to a platform orbiting the earth from the near reaches of outer space. Remote sensing by satellite (RSS) has been defined by the UN Working Group on Remote Sensing as a methodology to assist in characterizing the nature and conditions of the natural resources, the natural features and phenomena, and the environment of the earth by means of observation and measurements from space platforms.