In keeping with LL2’s long standing tradition of providing you with the hardest hitting and most practical legal exposés, this blog will now present an informative series on the law of alien contact.

To begin with, I should probably instead use the word “extraterrestrial” rather than “alien,” as alien is already a well established legal term of art. So this is not the law of foreigners in a state’s territory, but rather the law of contact with intelligent non-human entities that did not originate from earth.

What if First Contact happened tomorrow? How would humans react, and how would the law apply? Assuming the aliens didn’t immediately blast us out of existence, that is. I think it’s safe to say each state would want to have its own say in how things with the aliens go down, and that states would have their own individual opinions and conflicting agendas regarding the encounter. Which means, inevitably, they would each take whatever actions they deemed appropriate and then afterwords seek to justify those actions on the basis of contorted interpretations of international law. The United Nations would also want to establish a central role for itself in the fray, and because it does possess the institutional mechanisms that states tend to follow when seeking to take multinational action, the UN would likely emerge as the primary vehicle through which multilateral discussions and actions would take place.

So international law would be the natural language for states to use when framing these discussions. In this first post, I am going to examine how international law in its current form would govern an encounter in outer space between extraterrestrials and a national or international body. The next two posts will consider outer space encounters between aliens and private parties, and encounters with aliens on earth.

Read the rest of this entry: What if aliens land on a Canadian space ship? »