J17 - SciTech and Paradigms

One of the tasks involved with serving on a law journal is writing an academic article that could be published by the journal, or some other academic journal. This year, I am a member of the Albany Law School Journal of Science and Technology, or SciTech. So, my article has to relate somehow to science and/or technology, which is not a difficult task for me. Actually, the most difficult part, for me, is finding a way to relate the things I would like to write about back to law somehow.

Now, there’s a definite schedule that writers need to follow in order to make sure that their article is ready by the end of the year. The first deadline on this schedule involved the preparation of a possible topic list and the acquisition of a faculty advisor. Even though we got this schedule before the school year started, I went through life assuming that Professor Hirokawa would be my advisor, since my topic was going to involve the environment somehow, and he’s the environmental law professor. However, I never actually asked him to be my faculty advisor. As a result, I missed the first deadline. I cleared it with my editor, but it was still a little disappointing.

The three topics that I included on my topic list were: i) a plan for privatizing oceans, given that property in this age is considered to be whatever the government says it is, but no government has jurisdiction over the oceans; ii) an examination of the possible legal system of seasteading nations, given their desire to be relatively lawless islands of prosperity; and iii) how the legal system, specifically the common law, reinforce our negative and counterproductive conception of climate change. I’m gonna go with the third option, because it relates directly to my emc2 project and I don’t want to be working on two big research projects at once. However, the connection back to law is incredibly strained. So, I’m gonna have to work on that.

In discussing my topic with Professor Hirokawa, I realized something important. Property, as it exists in our society, is not the Lockean concept of property that is used in economics, particularly Austrian economics. I need to adjust my own idea of property to be more realistic; in this time and place, property is defined by law. It’s not so much that I own a parcel of land, it’s that I own a parcel of land in a residential zone subject to an easement for public access to the creek. My right to my property is absolute, but the definition of my property is constrained by law. Obviously, this needs to be rectified, but, in the meantime, if I’m going to communicate with people in the real world, I need to adjust my descriptions of certain concepts so that I’m not coming from a world of purely mental construction, assuming more from my audience than they can deliver. Moreover, this revelation reinforced the notion that ideas have real power in the physical world. We’re not just struggling against a climate change paradigm. There are many paradigms at work in our society that need to be questioned and reconsidered. That is a quite formidable challenge. And an exciting one.