Amphibious Legal Geographies: Toward Land-Sea Regimes

Keywords: amphibious legal geographies, land-sea regimes, ocean law, extractivism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Modern western law thrives on binaries. Alongside, and related to, the binaries between nature and culture, life and nonlife, and humans and nonhumans, a foundational bifurcation that sits at the heart of modern systems of law is that between land and sea. Tracing the making of this binary in Hugo Grotius and Carl Schmitt, my paper will unveil its contemporary manifestations in massive bureaucratic structures and institutional imaginaries. This includes not only the division of legal systems into national and international law, but the very idea of law as a terrestrial system that underlies extractivist imaginaries. Law ultimately imagines itself as beginning and ending on land. Drawing on John Gillis’s account (2012) of the “human edge species,” amphibious legal geographies are a call to recognize the shared material and symbolic qualities of both land and sea, and our continued existence as edge species that thrive not only by the sea but with the sea. Focusing on the ecotonal qualities of law, I will envision more pluralistic, relational, and holistic legal geographies that move beyond the land/sea binary and toward “land-sea regimes” (Benton & Perl-Rosenthal 2021).