Presumed Innocent: Navigation Rights and Risk-Based Activities in the Passamaquoddy Bay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the inter-relationship between the rules regarding innocent passage of foreign ships carrying hazardous goods through another state's territorial waters under the law of the sea, on the one hand, with the general obligations on states that arise under international environmental law in relation to transboundary environmental risks. These two sets of rules are considered in relation to a controversy between the United States and Canada over the potential siting of liquefied natural gas terminals in the Passamaquoddy Bay, which would require the shipping of liquefied natural gas through Canadian waters notwithstanding that the Canadian government has maintained that it has a sovereign right to exclude passage through these waters. My principal conclusion is that, notwithstanding the more precautionary posture of international environmental norms, international law as a whole has generally left the discretion to undertake risk-based activities in the hands of the states undertaking those activities. In short, risk-based activities are presumed innocent and the threshold for determining non-innocence remains high. That said, the procedural obligations of international environmental law provide an opportunity for a more cooperative and contextually sensitive approach to resolving disputes involving risk-based activities, such as the Passamaquoddy Bay controversy. In essence, the rules regarding innocent passage forsake contextual sensitivity in favour of legal certainty, while the rules in relation to transboundary environmental harm call for much greater consideration of the respective rights and interests of the parties. Taken together, the rules retain overall coherence by allowing source (flag) states to undertake unilateral activities, but only after satisfying onerous procedural obligations of risk evaluation and good faith consultation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".