For nearly ten years, Romania and Ukraine had been unable to agree on a boundary dividing their offshore waters and the accompanying seabed in the Black Sea. In 2004 Romania brought a case against Ukraine in the International Court of Justice, asking the United Nations’ judicial body to help resolve the dispute. When Ukraine had the opportunity to name a judge ad hoc to sit on the court in the case, it chose University of Miami School of Law professor Bernard H. Oxman.

“The parties at the moment are in the process of preparing their second round of written submissions. Once they are in, we will hear them,” says Oxman, who is only the second American to be appointed as judge ad hoc in the court’s 60-year history. Oxman is also the first, and to date the only, American to have served on the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, having been appointed judge ad hoc of that tribunal in a case between Malaysia and Singapore in 2003.

The International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea are two bodies authorized to settle disputes related to interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty—completed in 1982 and in force since 1994—is the culmination of decades of attempts to establish global agreement on the International Law of the Sea. Since graduating from Columbia Law School in 1965, Oxman has been one of the strongest advocates of that goal, which includes a push for U.S. participation in the convention.

Oxman’s impressive career in the field of international law has spanned close to 40 years and includes extensive experience in the Pentagon and Department of State. Upon his law school graduation, he went to work for the International Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Navy in Washington, D.C.—a job most wide-eyed law graduates could only dream of. Thinking there was little chance of landing the job, since junior officers were not typically placed in that division “because if you messed up it could become a really huge mess,” Oxman waited patiently on the pay phone for nearly an hour for their final decision, adding coins periodically so that the call would not go dead.

“They finally came back on the line, and they said it took them 40 minutes to find my file and that, yes, I had been assigned to international law,” Oxman recalls. “I have always assumed that in those 40 minutes they actually had made their decision.”

Oxman worked at the Pentagon in that position from 1965 to 1968. It was there that he first became exposed to the International Law of the Sea, and discussions on the subject surfaced not long after taking the job. In 1967 the Soviet Union, a growing maritime power in its own right, delivered a diplomatic note to the United States asking for its view on the idea of a new conference on International Law of the Sea. This stimulated an intense, multi-month study—the results of which culminated in the United States offering to meet with the Soviets to discuss the idea.

“I was very fortunate to begin my career at the Pentagon, dealing with this problem,” he says. “Behind those closed doors there was an atmosphere of lively debate and candid discussion on what would be to the greatest security advantage of the United States in any given situation. This was analyzed with a great deal of intellectual rigor, and that was an excellent way to begin a career.”

Dramatic changes in the International Law of the Sea in modern times can be traced back to 1945, when President Harry S Truman issued a proclamation claiming the natural resources of the continental shelf (the submerged part of the continent) for the United States. This simultaneously recognized that every other coastal country could do it—although the waters above the continental shelf were supposed to remain high seas (beyond the limits of the territorial jurisdiction).

The result was a cascade of claims not only to the continental shelf but to the high seas above and well beyond it, explains Oxman. Chile almost immediately followed suit in 1947 with a claim to a 200-mile zone in the waters, while Argentina claimed the continental shelf and the waters above the continental shelf. “The fundamental dilemma is that if we (the U.S.) could make claims beyond the traditional limit that suited us, other people could make claims that suited them. This set off a process that was very difficult to control,” he adds.

Until then, the inherited system in place was the freedom of the seas doctrine, which dates back to the 17th century. This doctrine limited national rights and jurisdiction over the oceans to a narrow belt of seas surrounding a national coast. The remainder of the seas was considered “open to all” and “belonging to no one.”

By 1958 an attempt was made (in what is now considered the first conference of the Law of the Sea) to lay down a series of conventions (or treaties) on the subject. These conventions dealt with the traditional questions, such as who is in control of coastal areas and the idea of freedom of navigation instead of coastal control. But they were not globally ratified, and a new effort began. After many preparatory negotiations, 1973 marked the year of the official conference on the International Law of the Sea. From then on, one to two sessions a year would be held on the subject, concluding in 1982 with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

“If you look at the convention from an international perspective, it has succeeded,” says Oxman. “You have 149 parties that have ratified it, and those parties include every major industrialized maritime state in the world except the United States.”

The United States, ironically enough, has not become part of the convention. The reason, says Oxman, lies in a portion of the treaty that deals with the future mining—once technology is invented to do so—of the deepest parts of the seabed.

“Over the years we have resolved many issues pertaining to the Law of the Sea; what was not settled was the ideological battle over resources that have yet to be exploited,” explains Oxman, who testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2003 and the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Hearings in 2004, urging the United States to ratify the convention. Today, the treaty submitted by President Clinton and supported by current President George W. Bush is still awaiting a vote in Congress. The outcome remains unclear.

Although Oxman immensely enjoyed practicing international law, he always knew he would eventually teach. In 1977 he left the Department of State to take a teaching job at the UM School of Law, after much persuasion by the then-dean Soia Mentschikoff. Almost immediately after taking the position, though, President Jimmy Carter’s representative from the Law of the Sea negotiations, Elliot Richardson, decided that he needed Oxman to continue working with the group and urged him to stay. “So I wound up for several years with the not-so-bad arrangement of spending my summers in Geneva and my winters in Miami,” Oxman says. “That wasn’t so awful.”

As a dedicated professor and director of the Master of Laws Program in Ocean and Coastal Law, Oxman tries to demystify his field by putting it into a context his students can understand. One example he uses to illustrate interests in an effective legal order is a scenario involving four hostile street gangs, each with the objective of ultimately dominating the other three. “But they cannot suppress the others now because they do not have the power to do so, and in addition, each of them worries that the other three might gang up on them,” he explains. Once he sets the scene, Oxman then asks the students to act as the lawyers (advisors to the respective gang leaders) and offers them a variety of potential outcomes.

One former student recalls yet another technique. “I remember that Professor Oxman started his lectures on the Law of the Sea holding the 1982 UN Convention in his hand and saying how it was wrong to consider the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as the one and only source of the Law of the Sea because there were other international treaties and customary international law that had to be studied too,” recalls Igor Vio, who graduated in May 1993 with an LL.M. degree in ocean and coastal law. Vio has since been working as a senior lecturer at the University of Rijeka, Department of Maritime Studies in Croatia.

“Professor Oxman was very influential in my decision to pursue an academic career in international law, and I have always truly considered him a mentor,” says Vincent Bantz, LL.M. ’00, a former student and research assistant of Oxman’s who is a lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland, Australia. “He always patiently and selflessly took the time to answer my questions and to debate difficult or controversial points. It’s not only the substance of the exchanges that I appreciated but also the exchanges themselves with a man who is profoundly sympathetic and honest.”

Indeed, Oxman has worn many hats during his career—lawyer, legal consultant, coeditor of the American Journal of International Law, international judge—and the work has been intellectually rewarding. But it’s the teaching, he says, that keeps him on his toes.

“I absolutely love the teaching. You never know what’s going to happen when you walk into the classroom,” says Oxman. “And being constantly in touch with younger people keeps you in tune with the shifting perceptions in society, which is just fascinating.”

Lisa Sedelnik, M.A. ’00, is a freelance writer in Miami, Florida.