International law, the (space) commons, and how they're made.
PhD @newcastleuni.bsky.social | 🇺🇸🇳🇱🏳️🌈 | 🔊: krɪs van aɪk | he/him
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/law/study/research/students/current-pgr-students/cristian-van-eijk/
Cris van Eijk
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On this #InternationalArchivesWeek I'd like to repost this absolute gem by the @bucksarchives.bsky.social!
To be clear, *international* environmental law lacks a definition of environment.
UK environmental law has tons and tons of definitions of environment, depending on your use, context, zodiac sign, & phase of the moon. 16 additional definitions have proliferated since the start of this sentence.
Shoutout to the definition of ‘tree’ in Bullock v Secretary for Environment [1980] 1 EGLR 140:
“anything which ordinarily one would call a tree is a ‘tree’.”
So it is *possible*!!
The politics of definition are not trivial, especially for queer and otherwise marginalised people. But even in general, this is a political issue.
People are still talking about Pluto, aka a shift 20yrs ago from one kind of definition of ‘planet’ to another. And that wasn’t defining *people*.
These attempts involve a legal definitionalism that I don’t feel is particularly justified at law, or very queer.
Why is law the ideal tool to define eg ‘woman’? What does definition do? Consider that eg environmental law & space law both exist w/o legal definitions of ‘environment’ or ‘space’.
