Story highlights An international court has determined China's claims in the South China Sea violate international law

Professor William Burke-White: This decision will be a true test of whether the law can constrain Chinese power

William Burke-White is a professor of law and the director of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2009-2011, he served on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague has issued a scathing legal rebuke of China's maritime claims in the South China Sea. This stunning decision pits the international legal order against the power of a rising China, with significant ramifications for both the international legal system and for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia. Whether law can constrain power now turns on how China, the United States and other countries in the region use the new decision.

Finding in favor of the Philippines, the court determined that China's expansive claims in the region were a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea , or UNCLOS, an international agreement that specifies the rights of states over the oceans and of which 166 countries are a party, including China.

China's efforts to build islands far from its shores created no new legal rights, the court decided, and deemed illegal China's military efforts to exclude the Philippines and other nations from fishing in the region.

China sought to avoid the dispute, refusing to send representatives to appear in person and challenging the legal right of the court to exercise jurisdiction in the case, arguing that the case related to territorial rights outside the court's powers, rather than the maritime rights over which the court has jurisdiction.

To a large degree, international legal efforts to accommodate the rise of China have been based on avoiding direct legal conflict where possible and allowing politics and diplomacy to take their natural course. Had the court accepted the Chinese position on jurisdiction, the conflict between law and power that now arises could have been put off to another day.

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