ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study, which focuses on the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), which was an attempt to obtain international consensus on issues regarding ownership and rights of usage of ocean resources. It examines the ends that drive distributive patterns and raise questions about the morality of those ends and the justness of the distribution. In a speech in August 1967 before the General Assembly, Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta requested that the United Nations reconsider the existing marine legal regime. In 1958, at UNCLOS 1,700 delegates from eighty-six countries came to an agreement over four conventions. The closest UNCLOS II came to accomplishing something meaningful was in setting the width of the territorial sea. Through the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union tried to keep the seabed issue apart from the other issues.
