International law is one of the few fields where by understanding history and law and writing about it you can have a vast long-term effect on the future of humanity. If you want the sort of space settlements that sci-fi geeks dream about, we need a legal regime that regulates away the possibility of territorial scrambles in the short term, allows peaceful scientific work together in the medium term, and perhaps, perhaps, one distant day, will permit the peaceful creation of independent nations off-Earth. Just as Dr. Oscar Schachter writing in the 1950s helped shape the law that governs
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