Mars Colony Legal Code: How Much Law Do We Take with Us?

How much law do we take with us? And whose?

It's not science fiction. Imagine if you were given the assignment to write a legal code for Mars.

Of course, you wouldn't start from scratch. But you wouldn't start with the hundred plus volumes of the New York statutes, either. So what's the minimum? Look at Alaska in 1959. Take out hunting and fishing and you know you have the minimum to run a jurisdiction.

Or the Canal Zone, which, while frozen in time, is also the minimum, with a few things subtracted and others added.

But these are American laws. Chinese citizens living and working in the Colony may not want to be subject to American law. And why should they? What about European law? And let's not forget Islamic law.

There have been a few "international" jurisdictions in history. The international zone in Tangier. Shanghai in the 1930's. There is U.S. case law about what laws apply to crimes committed on ice flows in international waters. The concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction may be discredited, but the time to talk about these things is now, before people start living on Mars.

Michael O'Kane was the last lawyer admitted to practice in the Panama Canal Zone. While he was also admitted to practice in the American states of Illinois, Florida and Louisiana, during most of his professional life he worked overseas in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. In 2008 he led a team that worked on a project to develop a set of laws for the governance of an autonomous region in Saudi Arabia.