Laws of the Sea

Laws of the Sea assembles scholars from law geography anthropology and environmental humanities to consider the possibilities of a critical ocean approach in legal studies.Unlike the United Nations’ monumental Convention on the Law of the Sea which imagines one comprehensive constitutional framework for governing the ocean Laws of the Sea approaches oceanic law in plural and dynamic ways. Critically engaging contemporary concerns about the fate of the ocean the collection’s twelve chapters range from hydrothermal vents through the continental shelf and marine genetic resources to coastal communities in France Sweden Florida and Indonesia. Documenting the longstanding binary of land and sea the chapters pose a fundamental challenge to European law’s “terracentrism” and its pervasive influence on juridical modes of knowing and making the world. Together the chapters ask: is contemporary Eurocentric law—and international law in particular—capable of moving away from its capitalist and colonial legacies established through myriad oceanic abstractions and classifications toward more amphibious legalities?Laws of the Sea will appeal to legal scholars geographers anthropologists cultural and political theorists as well as scholars in the environmental humanities political ecology ocean studies and animal studies.The Open Access version of this book available at //taylorfrancis has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.