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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
Antarctica is unique in its isolated location (990 km from the southern tip of South America), size (one-tenth of the surface of the globe), permanent ice-cap (covering 98% of the continent) with consequent extremes of climate, and absence of permanent human habitation. Do such unique characteristics, stressed by the explorers and scientists who know the region, make law unnecessary? Regulation is required where a people grows in number beyond family and tribal constraint and exchange and communication with other groups of people take place. With the few thousand scientists at present in Antarctica and their logistic support, provided in part by personnel of the armed forces – both disciplined groups under their home state laws – there is at the present time, apart from some conservation and communication measures, little need for the apparatus of legislation, courts and law enforcement as it exists in the modern state.
What relevance, then, has Antarctica for the lawyer? Probably little, at the present time, for the practitioner in one particular national system. Material for the comparative lawyer and private international lawyer is equally scanty.
But, if the absence of an indigenous population dispenses with the need for laws to preserve internal order, the size of Antarctica and its untapped resources in an international community increasingly aware of its finite limits, has produced a conflict of interests between states. The reconciliation and regulation of such conflict of interests falls squarely in the field of the public international lawyer. Antarctica, therefore, and the legal issues which it has presented, ever since its explorers received state backing, is of direct relevance to the international lawyer.
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