US sovereignty harmed more by remaining outside the convention as it will be subject to customary international law without ability to guide treaty

The author placed great emphasis on the Truman Proclamation 2667 (1945) and the Continental Shelf Convention 1958, to which the US is party, as being sufficient to meet all the current US needs. In so doing he uses two arguments which, to our minds, are merely legalistic. Thus he said, n44 as a parser of forms of words, that the difference in context between a coastal state and a state party among separate clauses in narrative usage determines whether or not the US should ratify. This position ignores the fact that UNCLOS 1982 was negotiated by the global community in order to provide a uniform, codified system for ocean management, including the Continental Shelves, for all states. This seems to be made clear by the exceptionally clear definitions contained in it. Thus, most of the world has agreed to go along with a clear Continental Shelf statement in UNCLOS 1982. n45 While the US may, of course, go it alone outside UNCLOS 1982, there is little doubt that a generally uniform global convention reduces uncertainty and confusion for all states parties as well as it would for the US if it were a party. Acceptance would not only further the rule of law but would also be a step closer to the goal of making maritime law uniform. This elusive goal, of course, has seen some progress in the past 150 years. n46 The US can have a [*59] great deal of influence on future developments within the UNCLOS 1982 regime if it has the prima facia credential of being a party. Unfortunately, isolation only diminishes its influence. Here, there seems to be the face of a neoisolationist and parochial sovereignty thematically buried in the author's arguments against UNCLOS 1982. However, every state large or small gives up some of its sovereignty in accepting any international convention, treaty, or agreement to which it is a party. n47 Every act under customary law may have the same effect albeit less precisely measurable and not as predictable by other states. The treaties of Munster n48 and Osnabruck, n49 further embodied in the instruments from the Congress of Vienna, are the cornerstones of modern state sovereignty and statehood. However, even such treaties were never pristine and precisely geometric in concept. There never has been an ideal sovereign within an ideal state having ideal laws. Like all law, international law is a living and sociallyrooted concept making survival of the world body politic more likely. Indeed, that is the impetus for its existence. That body of law, however, can be developed, revised, discarded, changed, and superseded by the wellknown mechanisms suggested supra. This has a clear implication not addressed by the author to which we wish he had given thoughtful detail.