Cosmic Counsel: The Lawyers Leading the Space Race
When Michelle Hanlon was 20 years into her career as an M&A attorney, her 11-year-old son came to her with a question: Could he, one day, legally mine asteroids in space? He had grand ambitions, and he had just read the book Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resource Ownership, by Virgiliu Pop. Like any mom (and good lawyer), Hanlon, who had grown up on Star Trek but had never heard of space law, set out trying to figure out the answer for her son. What she didn’t know was that an 11-year-old’s curiosity would result in a career change for the seasoned lawyer.
Today, Hanlon is assistant professor of practice and executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), where she plays a pivotal role figuring out issues ranging from whether her son can one day legally mine an asteroid to creating a governing framework for the extraction and utilization of space resources and ultimately the development of human communities in space. Space law is a niche but growing specialty, drawing on practice areas such as manufacturing, telecommunications, government regulation, international trade, environmental law, energy, and more.
In this story, we speak to two space lawyers navigating the terrain during a pivotal time: Hanlon, who saw opportunity in the unanswered questions across the field and teaches future lawyers how to confront them, and Paul Weber, general counsel of Blue Origin, who is endlessly inspired by the space technology company’s vision of possibility. As the number of commercial space organizations grows and technology rapidly advances, lawyers are going to become increasingly necessary not only to interpret existing outer space laws but also to address gaps in legislation that affect space activities and our relationship with the unknown.
The academic
Nine years after Hanlon’s son asked her about the laws of ownership and commercial activity in space, she decided to go back to school to become a space lawyer. As her youngest child entered college, Hanlon moved to Montreal and began an LL.M. in space law at McGill University, one of the oldest space law programs in the world. During the program, she studied under Ram Jakhu, a world-renowned expert in space law, and gained a foundation in established law—the Outer Space Treaty—as well as what questions were still up for debate. “I went into the space law program thinking I wanted to give back, and the way I can give back is to help evolve the law the way it needs to be,” she says.
After graduating with her LL.M. in space law, Hanlon founded a nonprofit, For All Moonkind, with the mission of safeguarding cultural heritage in space, starting with the six crewed lunar landing sites. After a year of working on the nonprofit, she got the job running Ole Miss’s Center for Air and Space Law. What she brought to space law academia was a mindset honed from years as a cross-border M&A attorney specializing in technology transactions. “As an international business lawyer, it’s your job to get the deal done,” she says. This background proved critical in this time of transformation. “I’ve entered the profession of space law at a time when there’s a transition from theorizing to actually addressing problems and providing solutions,” she says.
The Center for Air and Space Law was founded in 1965 and “is committed to nurturing the sustainable development and implementation of pioneering and practical legal solutions to present and future issues facing humanity on Earth, in the air and in space,” according to its website. As part of its mission, the center publishes two journals: the Journal of Space Law and the Journal of Drone Law and Policy. The Center administers an LL.M., a J.D. concentration, and a graduate certificate program, in addition to contributing to outreach with universities around the world.
“The Outer Space Treaty is a Magna Carta. It has principles and guidelines, it offers a framework, but it was largely a disarmament treaty,” Hanlon says. The last large international agreement regulating space—the moon agreement—entered into force in 1979. “That’s the last binding instrument that we’ve had about space,” Hanlon says. “And so it is our job today to fill in the gaps.” As an academic and diplomat, Hanlon would love to see a convention that broke down what it means to confront and explore space with “due regard,” a description that is mentioned in the Outer Space Treaty but not fully defined. Hanlon confronts this gap in the research through scholarship, teaching, and advocacy.
At Ole Miss, Hanlon has been instrumental in building a program that can produce graduates ready to enter space law practice. When she joined in 2018, there were two or three LL.M. students. Now, they have between 35 and 45. When she first arrived, they had only basic course offerings. Today, there are courses like AstraPolitica, which explores the geopolitics of space activities; AstroLaw and Ethics, Export Controls, Procurement Law, and many more. They’ve moved from the foundations to “let’s get into the nitty-gritty and start solving problems,” as she puts it. Indeed, Ole Miss now offers more courses in space law than any other program in the United States.
For Hanlon, this pivotal time in space law also means she “can never use the same syllabus from year to year,” she says. She is constantly thinking about what world she’s preparing her students for. “If you want to become a professor of space law, then McGill is still a very good choice for you. If you want to go to into cybersecurity, then you should go to Nebraska. But if you want to go out there and actually be a practicing space lawyer, that’s what we are really focused on producing here at Ole Miss,” she says. There are still only a handful of programs in the country that do this type of work, meaning some of the work that the Center for Air and Space Law does is outreach—bringing space law to other countries and to high school students.
Hanlon makes the case that every lawyer is going to need to learn something about space law soon. A 2022 Harvard Business Review article titled “Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now” makes the case that even sectors like pharmaceuticals and consumer goods should be thinking about space. Recalling one article by fellow space lawyers Steven Freeland and Donna Lawler, Hanlon paraphrases: “Ten years from now, if you are a lawyer that doesn’t know space law, then you are going to be at a risk of malpractice because that is how important space is to our lives.” Hanlon knows that companies might not be thinking that way yet. She says: “If you go into commercial space right now and say, What are you looking for in a lawyer?, they’re going to tell you, ‘I’m looking for somebody who can do contracts and knows admin law and U.S. regulations and export controls.’” What Ole Miss is trying to do is “add that space sensibility,” she says.
“I have had conversations with space lawyers at law firms who say space lawyers don’t need an LL.M. because space needs people who know about all the other parts of the law,” said says. “I think that’s shortsighted. When we look at what’s happening in space law, we’re making it every day and we’re creating norms every day. It’s important to understand the framework that we’re working in and how far we can push within that framework. If you are an admin lawyer or a contracts lawyer who doesn’t know the ins and outs of the Outer Space Treaty, you might put something in the contract that is a violation of the law or you might be too timid to push a little bit on that law. The lawyers we train are the ones who are going to be able to go to the FAA and say, “Look, this is how we think the regulation should look. And don’t worry: it is in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty,” or “We have this gray area and this is how we should fill it.”
At the Center for Air and Space Law, in addition to thinking concertedly about space law training, the Center also makes it a point to bring in engineers and technologists to talk to their students. “If you don’t know how a rocket works, how are you going to figure out how to regulate it?” she says.
While teaching and running the Center, Hanlon still makes time for her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, where she has been instrumental in gaining national and international legal recognition of the importance of human heritage in space, including through the development of the One Small Step Act in the U.S. In her capacity with the nonprofit, Hanlon also regularly contributes to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Amid all of this, Hanlon is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law while also providing consulting services. All of these activities keep her busy but are exhilarating and necessary in a world where space law requires a multipronged approach.
Thirty years ago, Hanlon would not have envisioned this would be the work she’d be doing. Once she realized math was not her thing, she stopped dreaming of being an astronaut. But she’s found an important way to contribute to this critical time in outer space exploration and commercialization. “When future historians look back on this era, they will identify it as the beginning of our space-faring civilization,” she says.
From: The Practice at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession
Prof. Hanlon Calls for U.S. to Invest in ‘New Space Race’
OXFORD, Miss. – University of Mississippi law professor Michelle Hanlon spoke before the House Committee on Natural Resources in December to make the case for more consideration and investment in space mining.
Joining a panel of four before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee, Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law in the School of Law and co-founder and CEO of For All Moonkind, said that while being able to mine the moon and return its resources to Earth may be 60-80 years away, the United States must act soon to regulate such actions if it doesn’t want to be cut off from future mining endeavors.
“The witnesses before us today are among the most preeminent intellects and entrepreneurs in their field,” said U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, of Arkansas, who chairs the committee. “I understand that mining in space is not an issue we hear about every day in Congress, but the fact is some of our greatest competitors, including China and Russia, have established a new space race.
“Sadly, it seems countries like Russia and China have already completed a lap and the U.S. government is seemingly unaware that the race has started.”
One of the problems at play in the coming space race is regulation and, in some cases, the lack thereof, Hanlon said. The Artemis Accords, a series of principles guiding the civil exploration of space, state that the 33 countries that signed the accord will act with “due regard” toward one another in space.
“The concept of due regard suggests that if one entity is already occupying (an area), others must avoid interfering,” she said. “This gives tremendous advantage to those who simply establish a presence first. And so, the race begins.”
The principle of due regard is largely unspecified, which Hanlon said could result in some countries taking liberties with the clause. Without a more specific definition of due regard, countries that reach a desirable area first could argue that no other country is allowed within miles of their landing site, the Ole Miss professor said.
“What’s worse, these rules could by default apply not just to one celestial body but can become the foundation of all extraterrestrial resource management, wherever the source,” she said.
A large focus of Tuesday’s meeting was China, which dominates much of the world’s mineral supply chain and is heavily invested in mining the moon.
“The U.S.’s closest competitor in this new space race is China,” Hanlon said. “China has made no secret of its own space resource utilization plans, and remember, winning requires only getting there first.”
The importance of getting to the moon first is not just to enact the Artemis Accords’ due regard principle, but to ensure the fair distribution of the minerals the celestial body can provide, she said.
“If we want to see the equitable, responsible use of space resources and see them managed in an equitable manner, we need to be led by countries that are part of the Artemis Accords who will support freedom, democracy and equity here on Earth and in space,” Hanlon said. “Humanity’s future lies in space.
“We have a lot of problems here on Earth, but the answers we will find in space, including, ultimately, peace.”
When is a Public Official’s Social Media Private? Prof. Green Offers Analysis
The U.S. Supreme Court will take up two cases Tuesday (Oct. 31) to answer a new question regarding Americans’ First Amendment rights: Can elected officials block their constituents on social media?
The issue at hand is whether the elected officials in Lindke v. Freed and O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier were acting as public servants or merely as themselves in their online presences, said Chris Green, University of Mississippi law professor and Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government.
“There are a bunch of fascinating issues about the boundary of the state,” Green said. “Where does the government official end and people’s private lives begin?”
In Lindke v. Freed, a city manager in Port Huron, Michigan, blocked a resident and deleted their critical comments from his Facebook page. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that did not violate the resident’s First Amendment rights.
However, in O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two California school board members may have violated First Amendment rights when they blocked two parents after they posted critical comments.
It is the difference of circuit court opinion between the two similar cases that brought this issue to the Supreme Court, Green said.
“Because they took both cases, (the Supreme Court isn’t) likely to reverse both of them, but it is possible they could come up with a third way to solve this,” the Ole Miss law professor said. “It’s the kind of problem you’ve had for centuries, where you have individual people with more than one hat.
“Here, it’s just very, very easy to manufacture a new hat.”
The cases bear resemblance to a lawsuit regarding former U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media account, where the president had blocked several people who criticized him. The Supreme Court tossed that suit, though it had succeeded in lower courts, on the basis that Trump was no longer president.
The primary concern of the upcoming cases is determining whether the city manager and school board members were acting in their public official roles on their social media accounts, Green said.
The school board members created personal, public Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, accounts before they were elected that they used for campaign purposes, to address public issues and for official business.
Freed made his Facebook page while in college and used it primarily for personal reasons, though he did post public news and official business after he became city manager, court documents said. When he hit the 5,000 “friend” limit on Facebook, he converted his profile to a page, which cannot be made private.
“If they’re wearing a governmental hat, there are a bunch of rules they need to have about treating everybody equally,” Green said. “They can’t just say, ‘You’re being annoying. I’ll block you on Facebook.’
“If you’re acting as a government officer, mere annoyance isn’t enough. You have to behave even-handedly because of the First Amendment.”
Still, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will make a blanket ruling that all social media pages of public officials are inherently places of government business, Green said.
“The Supreme Court isn’t going to adopt a rule that says, ‘When in doubt, you’re acting as the government,’” he said. “But it’s hard to tell what they will do, because it’s such a new issue.”