With special guest, Prof. Renisa Mawani (UBC)

In European accounts of international law, the history of the sea as a juridical space of the international commonly begins with Hugo Grotius’s, Mare Liberum (1609). This talk, which draws from Prof. Mawani’s book, 'Across Oceans of Law', presents a counter legal history of the sea. Specifically, it situates the freedom of the sea in the oceanic movements and imaginaries of subaltern travelers who, as legal subjects, produced their own juridical conceptions of maritime space, ones that often undermined the land/sea divide that proved so crucial to Grotius and to the legal history of the sea that has since followed.

This event is co-sponsored by: the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Faculty of Public Affairs, the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies - Human Rights