The UN Secretary General … circa 2050, Earth, talking with Kip who, along with Peewee, has just saved the Earth from invading aliens who were using the Moon as a forward base:
“Russell, I heard on your tape that you plan to study engineering – with a view to space.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, ‘Yes, Mr. Secretary’.”
“Have you considered studying law? Many young engineers to want to space – not many lawyers. But the Law goes everywhere. A man skilled in space law and meta-law would be in a strong position.”
“Why not both?” suggested Peewee’s Daddy. ”I deplore this modern overspecialization.”
“That’s an idea,” agreed Mr. van Duivendijk. ”He could then write his own terms.”
A couple of notes on this classic juvenile sci-fi book by Robert Heinlein from the 1950s, Have Spacesuit Will Travel. Already proposing joint degrees! What’s “meta-law” supposed to be, anyway? Do we like “to space” as a verb? Does “the Law go everywhere”?
Lest we think this is pure juvenalia, however, earlier in the novel there is a fascinating passage, one that I read as a kid and always stuck with me right through law school. The Three Galaxies “government” – a decentralized collective security apparatus, since, as Heinlein notes in detail, the heterogeneity of the cultures and planets and creatures represented precludes any deeper governance arrangement – puts the bad, Earth-invading aliens on “trial,” and decides to “rotate” their planet 90 degrees out of ordinary space-time. Which, as Kip says, doesn’t really sound so bad, until he finds out that they don’t take their sun with them. Then it seems even to Kip, more than justice really warranted.
But then Kip is surprised and horrified to find out that Earth is next on the list of Three Galaxy hearings, before a computer that represents all of the collected wisdom and voice of all the member planets. Kip can’t figure it out – it’s unjust, what has Earth done to anyone? How can it be on trial? Says the computer:
“From three samples of the organism you call the human race I can predict the future potentialities and limits of that race.”
“We have no limits! There’s not telling what our future will be.”
“It may be that you have no limits,” the voice agreed. ”That is to be determined. But, if true, it is not a point in your favor. For we have limits.”
“Huh?”
“You have misunderstood the purpose of this examination. You speak of ‘justice’. I know what you think you mean. But no two races have ever agreed on the meaning of that term, no matter how they say it. It is not a concept I deal with here. This is not a court of justice.”
“Then what is it?”
You would call it a ‘Security Council’. Or you might call it a committee of vigilantes. It does not matter what you call it; my sole purpose is to examine your race and see if you threaten our survival. If you do, I will now dispose of you. The only certain way to avert a grave danger is to remove it while it is small.”
A radical claim of moral relativism about justice, preventive war, collective security but disconnected from justice, hard-boiled cost benefit analysis, and the One Percent Doctrine … it should be clear now how Opinio Juris’s Chris Borgen, Glenn Reynolds, and I got to be the way we are.
Orin says:
Best.Post.Ever.
December 20, 2009, 11:45 amRandy says:
Just goes to show, artists often are ahead of the zeitgeist.
December 20, 2009, 12:03 pmDavid says:
Well…uhhh…I think it only fair to point out that the Three Galaxies “council” are the bad guys here.
If what you took away from this is admiration for the essentially amoral, purely consequentialist attitude that they embody…I can only suggest to you that you have profoundly misread what Heinlein was trying to convey here.
December 20, 2009, 1:34 pmpireader says:
Randy–Just goes to show, artists often are ahead of the zeitgeist
The Three Galaxies organization rather resembles the UN Security Council as FDR originally conceived it: the major powers ganging up to put down threats to their security whilst they were still manageable (read: Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan).
So the idea was in the air from the 1940s on (if not earlier, from the Congress of Vienna). Heinlein was channeling the zeitgeist rather than anticipating it.
And let me echo Professor Anderson. I too read Have Spacesuit … as a kid. It, and other Heinlein books, shaped my perceptions in ways that still occasionally surprise me.
December 20, 2009, 2:05 pmtamerlane says:
When Heinlein wrote this the majority of UN members were real nation-states. Now the majority are thuggish kleptocracies that exploit their subjects and seek to further engorge their secret, overseas bank accounts with “development” money from the taxpayers of real countries. If Heinlein had seen this coming he wouldn’t have dealt as kindly with the UN as he did in most of his fiction.
December 20, 2009, 2:27 pmKenneth Anderson says:
David: Admiration is not what I took away from it – rather, it was the first time the distinction had occurred to me, and it is one of those analytic distinctions that turns out to be useful over the long term.
But I don’t think Heinlein meant that the Three Galaxies council was the bad guy. It’s much more ambiguous than that. After all, the book talks at the end of Mother Thing being the cop on the beat, watching out for earth, hints of avoiding a nuclear holocaust, etc. That’s alongside the concern that the vigilante galactic committee might decide to rotate your planet 90 degrees out of ordinary space time.
I do agree with pireader that Heinlein is channeling a certain FDR conception of the Security Council in the early days – but as Paul Kennedy explores in the best (well, only really good) chapters in his book on the history of the UN, Parliament of Man, the FDR conception itself of the Security Council was always riven between the idea of security committee of great powers, and a committee of genuinely “just” actors.
Probably more than interests any live human being, but I talk about this at length in a review of Kennedy’s book – in which I had that book I read in 5th grade firmly in the back of my mind – here in the Revista de Libros of Madrid, but in English.
December 20, 2009, 2:55 pmCorkie the Dog says:
When Kip was asked who would speak for man, his response:
I think of this from time to time — absent dogs, we would be horribly, utterly alone.
Sincerely,
December 20, 2009, 3:06 pmCorkie the Dog
Kenneth Anderson says:
Hooray for Corkie!
December 20, 2009, 3:48 pmAngel says:
I speak for my human, Sun Tzu’s nephew!
And he’s A-OK. Some other humans, on the other hand, should be spaced (to be ejected from a spacecraft while exoatmosphere, sans spacesuit).
Woof!
December 20, 2009, 3:55 pmnumeral says:
Ugh, I need to get that book, I’ve read a lot of Heinlein but I’ve missed that one :/
December 20, 2009, 4:15 pmSpace Law and the UN, Retro Edition | Liberal Whoppers says:
[...] the original post: Space Law and the UN, Retro Edition Share this [...]
December 20, 2009, 4:20 pm[insert here] delenda est says:
Is it just me, or is the verb in that sentence ‘view’, not ‘to space’? Isn’t ‘to space’ the object? Ie, ‘study…with a view to [insert place here, in this case space]‘?
I also read this a long time ago.
December 20, 2009, 5:07 pmXenocles says:
I thought that too at first, but it comes up again in the next paragraph clearly as a verb. What I find interesting is the dramatic change in the meaning from “travel in space” to “kill by ejecting into space without a suit.” Some of us are more familiar with that latter meaning, which was also dominant in Heinlein’s later novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”
December 20, 2009, 5:12 pmLindsey Abelard says:
Of course the law goes everywhere. We need an effective regime of private property rights in space. This is a job for the lawyers. There is a lawyer, a long time L-5 Society member, who has handled space law cases. His name is Wayne White and he is very good. He occasionally makes presentation on legal issues at space conferences. He has proposed a use-based concept of property rights in space that is analogous to the home-stead act of 1865.
December 20, 2009, 6:09 pmtheobromophile says:
Oddly, when I was applying to Northwestern and mentioned space law in connection with my engineering degree, the interviewer laughed at me.
“Space law? I’m a lawyer and I’ve never heard of space law!… How can you regulate the stars and the planets and the moons?”
December 20, 2009, 6:15 pm[insert here] delenda est says:
Yes I remember that use, but it doesn’t seem to be the use here: it clearly isn’t what he had in view as the goal of his engineering studies!
December 20, 2009, 7:01 pmRich Rostrom says:
tamerlane: “When Heinlein wrote this the majority of UN members were real nation-states.”
Have Spacesuit Will Travel was published in 1958. Even then, most of UN were thugs. Of 92 members, 9 were the USSR and its satellites, 9 were Latin American dictatorships, 6 were Arab monarchies, 20 others were military dictatorships, monarchies, civilian kleptocracies. I counted only 37 respectable governments, and several of those were borderline.
December 20, 2009, 7:02 pmLarryA says:
I think cats would speak for us.
As in, “We’ve got this world set up the way we want. Leave our servants alone.”
If you really want to get into Heinlein’s space meta-law, read “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
December 20, 2009, 7:57 pmarbitraryaardvark says:
Heinlein invented the waterbed, the waldo, the artificial cow, and probably a few new verbs.
December 20, 2009, 8:52 pmRyan Waxx says:
I never meta-law I didn’t like.
December 20, 2009, 11:47 pmKenneth Anderson says:
Ryan wins the thread. By 50 light years.
December 21, 2009, 12:11 amSarcastro says:
Wait, is that 50 metric light-years?
December 21, 2009, 1:34 amAngel says:
What? You have waxx in your ears?
December 21, 2009, 9:28 amAngel says:
Well, it’s less than 12 parsecs….
December 21, 2009, 9:29 amMelvin H. says:
Angel: 50 light-years is more than 12 parsecs (1 parsec=3.26 light years); 12 parsecs then is a little more than 39.12 light years.
Sarcastro: One light-year = 9.461 x (10 to the 12th power) Kilometers, or 5.879 x (10 to the 12th power) miles. [I'm rounding here to avoid VERY long numbers!] I am guessing that you are being sarcastic about a metric light year (chuckling).
December 21, 2009, 10:08 amRandy says:
Pireader: “So the idea was in the air from the 1940s on (if not earlier, from the Congress of Vienna). Heinlein was channeling the zeitgeist rather than anticipating it.”
Obviously you are wrong because you assume time travels in only one direction, and we all know that’s not true. Just watch Dr. Who sometime and that should explain it.
December 21, 2009, 11:13 amJim S. says:
Is it pathetic that I recognized this quote before I finished reading it? Especially when considering that I haven’t read this book in over two decades?
December 21, 2009, 3:34 pmliamascorcaigh says:
What is it with Sci-Fi stories? Every planet is populated by only one race who speak one language – like Zordon upon which dwell Zordons who speak, well, Zordon. Okay, maybe there are also Yalblols who live underground and are blind albinos who speak Grunt, but you get my point.
On Earth we call these places countries.
And then, there’s, like, one Supreme Council – referred to as The Ancients, The Wise Ones, The All-Knowing Knowingers or such like – who meet in Solemn Conclave dressed in Druidic garb with inappropriately sized sandals and seek to impose their Impenetrable Will on the whole planet and utter Judicial Imperatives in an Ancestral Glossia mastered only by the Elect.
On Earth we call these the Harvard Law Faculty.
December 23, 2009, 7:40 amDavid Hess says:
Pournelle’s collection of short stories “High Justice” includes trials for murder and hijacking in space before national jurisdiction is asserted.
December 25, 2009, 3:08 pm