When Good Lawyers Write Bad History: Unreliable Evidence and the South China Sea Territorial Dispute.

The recent award by an arbitral tribunal in a case brought by the Philippines against China gives lawyers reason to reexamine the historical evidence put forward by claimants in the South China Sea disputes. While the Tribunal was barred from considering territorial or boundary questions, it did cast doubt on the historical narrative rule that China has asserted in support of its claims. Fresh evidence from other sources also suggests that discussions of these matters need to move beyond arguments put forward in a small number of papers published more than thirty years ago. A close examination of the references used in those papers shows that they relied upon highly partisan Chinese sources. Recent historical research has produced new facts about the development of the competing territorial claims in the South China Sea, but international legal discourse has yet to take these findings into account. This article examines some of the key works in the field and calls for them to be reassessed and for future discussion of the disputes to be based upon verifiable and contextualized evidence rather than on nationalist assertions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]