Germination of Outer Space as a Legal Concept
The Paris and Chicago Conventions of 1919 and 1944,[1] respectively, recognized the exclusive sovereignty of states to the airspace above their territory. Delegates did not discussouter space as such. Thus they established no line of demarcation as to where airspace ended and outer space began. Whether national sovereignty extended indefinitely over a nation’s territory was not resolved.[2]
Even with the rapid changes in technology extending flight higher and higher, sovereignty over outer space was seldom discussed until the early 1950s. By then the launching of rockets into space and plans to boost an object into orbit madediscussion of this issue more imperative. As has often occurred,not until technology demands does a development in or of thelaw follow. From the beginning, the sovereignty issue—how high a state’s sovereignty extends, if at all, into outer space—has been the genesis of much discussion regarding outer space law. While many other outer space law issues were eventually resolved, the issue of how high sovereignty extends—the issue that started much of the discussion—remains unresolved.
In 1951 John Cobb Cooper—law professor and head of the Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University in Montreal,and a member of the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study—published “High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty,” a seminal and thought-provoking treatise.[3] Professor Cooper had served as part of the US delegation to the 1944 ICAO meetings and was a major force behind the decision to conclude the Chicago Convention. His 1951 treatise generated substantial discussion within the legal and scientific communities regarding the need to define where airspace became outer space.[4]
- ↑ International Convention for Air Navigation and Convention on International Civil Aviation, respectively
- ↑ Sir Arnold Duncan McNair, Michael R. E. Kerr, and Robert A. MacCrindle, The Law of the Air, 2d ed. (London: Stevens, 1953), appendix, 295-328, cited in Lee Bowen, “An Air Force History of Space Activities 1945-1959” (Washington, D.C.: USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, August 1964), 59; and Col Martin B. Schofield, USAF, “Control of Outer Space,” Air University Quarterly Review 10, no. 1 (Spring 1958): 93-104.
- ↑ John Cobb Cooper, “High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty,” International Law Quarterly Review 4 (July 1951): 411-18.
- ↑ Bowen, 58-59.
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