Ocean Legalities: The Law and Life of the Sea

Workshop Synopsis: Whether written from an animal rights, animal welfare, or environmental law perspective, existing legal scholarship on nonhumans typically values organisms that are “big like us”—large, terrestrial, and vertebrate. Legal scholarship overlooks and is often challenged by forms and mediums of life radically unlike our own. Our work problematizes these tendencies, exposing the biopolitical hierarchies naturalized through their modes of classification and operation by exploring a new subject of inquiry: ocean legalities.

Ocean Legalities is situated at the nexus of environmental and animal law, posthumanism, animal geography, science and technology studies, multispecies ethnography, and Foucauldian biopolitics. Ocean Legalities explores how the seas confound the cultural, historical, and linguistic structures upon which our regulatory apparatuses rest. In doing so, the text shows that marine matter and marine life requires alternative legal imaginaries and forms of governance in our rapidly changing environments.

Irus Braverman, Professor, William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar, University at Buffalo School of Law

Elizabeth R. Johnson, Visiting Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges