THE UNITED-STATES AND THE NEW LAW OF THE SEA

This article examines the objections by the United Stales to the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention and explains why the government rejected a t reaty that it had worked so long and hard to produce. This study also evaluates UN efforts since 1990 to reconcile international difficultie s over seabed mining. The focus here falls on how deep seabed provisio ns of the 1982 text were revised to vender the Convention move accepta ble to the United States. Certain lessons for multilateral negotiation s from the protracted law of the sea experience ave also proffered, es pecially how circumstances of time, economics, politics, and personali ties can affect the outcomes of complex international negotiations. Fi nally the 1994 Implementation Agreement is assessed. The conclusion is that this Agreement makes notable improvements benefitting U.S. inter ests as a principal ocean miner. It replaces an overly detailed and co stly regime in Part XI of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention text with a more streamlined approach to deep seabed mining; it allows for inst itutional development of a commercial recovery management regime that is move consistent with free market principles; it establishes princip les of cost-efficiency, nondiscrimination, and functional necessity as bases for actions under the Agreement; it places the Enterprise on a more equal basis with private contractors; it replaces mandatory techn ology transfer to the Enterprise with provisions for greater cooperati on and more effective protection of intellectual property rights. Fina lly, the implementation Agreement establishes a voting system within t he Authority that allocates greater influence to the United States as a decisionmaker as well as greater security of its political and econo mic interests.