Space Law and Science Fiction: From Hugo Grotius’ Freedom of the Seas to Tom Godwin’s Cold Equations

Jasper Bovenberg, writing for the Duke Law and Technology Review in his 2006 article Mining the Common Heritage of our DNA:  Lessons Learned from Grotius and Pardo, provides a nice summary of the Dutch legal scholar Grotius’ arguments about the freedom of the high seas.  We’ve all heard how this fellow Grotius was an early proponent of the freedom of the seas.  The 2015 U.S. law recognizing the rights of space miners to extract resources from outer space follows in his footsteps.  He got a lot r...