Laws of the Sea

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her books include Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (2009), Zooland: The Institution of Nature (2012), and Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018) as well as the coedited volume Blue Legalities: The Laws and Life of the Sea (2020). Braverman’s monograph, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel, is forthcoming.

The human impact on the atmosphere is a matter of intense common concern. The human impact on the ocean, humanity’s other ultimate common good, must also be studied at the empirical and legal and conceptual levels, enabling a more sophisticated legal response. This ground-breaking book is a major contribution to that study. ---Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law at Cambridge UniversityWe are at a critical juncture in ocean governance. This collection raises important questions that highlight both the explicit and the less explicit choices in future ocean governance, including whether the existing legal architecture should be fixed or remade. The unique timing of this collection makes the questions tackled in this book not only academically interesting for the multiple disciplines represented, but of immense practical importance for our shared future. ---Lisa Campbell, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Affairs and Policy, Duke University These thought-provoking, imaginative essays push beyond conventional representations of the oceans as distinctive legal spaces. The authors connect deeply researched case studies to new analytical approaches to maritime legal geographies. ---Lauren Benton, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, Yale University; author of A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900The sea is a space of law — and more, exactly, laws, plural. As the contributors to this book teach us across a range of powerful near-shore, open-ocean, deep marine, and aquabiotic cases, legal abstractions now saturate, slice up, and, sometimes, sicken the sea itself. Tuning to how law in fact operates as amphibious — mixing land and sea — this book is a brief for re-mapping sea law is ways at once more empirical and more just.---Stefan Helmreich, author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial SeasThe wateriness of law is longstanding. Colonial domination, slavery, and indentured labour were enabled by an amphibious assault of power/knowledge. But in most accounts the watery spaces and beings of this planet remain over-determined by land-based notions of sovereignty, and laws "grounded" on islands, shorelines, and continental contiguities. This collection of timely and evocative essays shatters the land/sea binary, and breaks down the borders of life/non-life. Moving across the sea-bed to river-deltas, marine genetic resources, and fisheries, the book is a rich collection of the new forms of knowledge and epistemic practices needed in order to appreciate amphibious legal geographies. This book, then, is a raft that may help life and non-life survive the toxic legacies of western legal abstraction.---Stewart Motha, Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London

• AcknowledgmentsList of ContributorsIntroductionAmphibious Legal Geographies: Toward Land-Sea RegimesIrus BravermanChapter 1The Vexed Liminality of Hydrothermal Vents: An Opportunity to Unmake the Law of the SeaSurabhi RanganathanChapter 2Commodifying the Oceans: The North Sea Continental Shelf Cases RevisitedHenry JonesChapter 3Imagining Justice with the Abyssal OceanSusan ReidChapter 4Genetic Freedom of the Seas in the Age of Extractivism: Marine Genetic Resources in Areas Beyond National JurisdictionIrus BravermanChapter 5Oceanic Heterolegalities? Ocean Commons and the Heterotopias of Sovereign LegalityVito De LuciaChapter 6Mining the Seas: Speculative Fictions and FuturesElizabeth DeLoughreyChapter 7Navigating the Structural Coherence of Sea IcePhilip Steinberg, Greta Ferloni, Claudio Aporta, Gavin Bridge, Aldo Chircop, Kate Coddington, Stuart Elden, Stephanie C. Kane, Timo Koivurova, Jessica Shadian, and Anna Stammler-GossmannChapter 8UNCLOS as a Geopolitical Chokepoint: Locked Down, Locked In, Locked OutElspeth ProbynChapter 9From Extended Urbanization to Ocean Gentrification: Miami’s River Port and the Precarious Geographies of Haitian ShippingJeffrey S. KahnChapter 10Miles and Norms in the Fishery of Marseille: On the Interface between Social Norms and Legal RulesFlorian GriselChapter 11Divided Environments: Scalar Challenges in Sweden’s Marine and Coastal Water PlanningAron WestholmChapter 12Good Human–Turtle Relationships in Indonesia: Exploring Intersecting Legalities in Sea Turtle ConservationAnnet Pauwelussen & Shannon Switzer SwansonAfterwordWe Are All Complicit: Performing Law through WavewritingAndreas Philippopoulos-MihalopoulosIndex