Random Law Review # 4

Christian Diemer's and Amalija Separovic's Territorial Questions and Maritime Delimitation with Regard to Nicaragua's Claims to the San Andrés Archipelago, 66 Heidelberg Journal of International Law 5 (2006).

Well, I signed up for random and this is about as random as it gets. Nicaragua has filed a case with the International Court of Justice, arguing that the San Andrés archipelago falls within Nicaragua's legal territorial boundaries instead of that of Columbia. The authors analyze the history of the claim and come down on Columbia's side for two main reasons: (1) Columbia has a long, uncontested history of exercising practical control and sovereignty over the islands; and (2) in the 1928 Barcenas-Esguerra treaty, Nicaragua appears to relinguish claims to the archipelago.

This was an interesting article for me to read because it really gets about as close to pure law as you're going to get--so much of what I do and read is "law" as a thin layer on top of what is basically history, politics and policy making, science, or some other discipline. But what's going on here--interpreting treaties, drawing boundary lines, etc.--is something no other discipline can rightly lay claim to doing.