No More Making Fun of International Space Law

So there I was, bored last Sunday morning, looking for something to write about.  I pulled up Google and tried the usual search terms.  A personal favorite of mine, "Indiana Tech Law School," turned up nothing again - they're keeping a rather low profile recently - so I turned my attention to space law, an oft-cited exciting new area of law that is exploding with opportunities for law grads.  Could space law be the new international law, the hot practice area of the 2000s which failed to materialize?

And I found not just space law, but international space law.

Yup, I stumbled upon the website for the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs, an organization that has pages devoted to international space law.  So no more teasing people who want to get into this hot area of practice.  It's legit.  International space law.  Who'd have thought it even possible?

And then there's organizations such as the International Institute of Space Law, which seems to be more concerned with padding the resumes of the space lawyers involved than with actually doing much space lawyering.

According to this article, space law is poised to become the savior of the entire legal profession:

America's struggling legal business, once a high-flying profession whose leaders could bill $1,000 per hour, may be turning the corner, thanks to developments both earthly and unearthly.

Reading on:

In addition, the industry is now preparing for the rise of increased demand for a new kind of legal service ... a demand that comes from outer space. 

Consider this: Commercial spaceflights may take off from the New Mexico desert next year with Virgin Galactic, and Planetary Resources is planning to mine near-Earth asteroids for minerals in less than 10 years. Which jurisdiction adjudicates a mishap in orbit? What if two satellites collide? Who pays the bill? And who exactly has an enforceable claim to minerals on an asteroid? Which parties bear responsibility if mining debris in orbit crashes into a satellite or falls to Earth and trashes a building or kills people?

The prospect of such disputes -- which are closer than many realize -- is fueling the creation of space law and programs that focus on space law.

Er, okay?  Then there's this article:

Ambulance chasing only gets you so far. Hitching a ride, metaphorically speaking, on rockets funded by private corporations seeking fortunes beyond Earth's atmosphere is where it's at for eager legal pioneers.

There are stellar opportunities for lawyers specializing in space exploration. Space law is quickly becoming an integral part of the evolving aerospace industry. These lawyers exist in a tightly knit industry that deals with all kinds of practical issues and some that seem cribbed from science fiction. Depending on whether the space lawyer is in private practice or academia, he or she could handle anything from liability laws pertaining to litigious space tourists to the legal framework surrounding human encounters with E.T.

...and so on and so forth.

So how can students get a foot in the door of this practice area?  Well, there's a handy little document published on the UNOOSA site which details the opportunities for education in this area of law.  They could study at places such as GWU, with its tuition of a mere $44,000.  Maybe that hotbed of advanced science and forward thinking, Mississippi, where the JD with a concentration in "Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law" (wow!) is a drop in the bucket at almost $21,000 per year.

Nebraska?  You can get a JSD in space law for a total tuition cost of $60,000.  And in Houston, the one semester program costs $17,000.  Houston, you have a problem!

So once you've spent your fifty or sixty grand (maybe twice that at some places when all is said and done) on your qualification in space law from a US university, five to ten times more expensive than comparable qualifications from overseas, let's take a look at some of the opportunities that await.

After much searching, just about the only thing about space law that I couldn't find were job openings for space lawyers.  Surely I must be mistaken?  Not trying hard enough perhaps?

Looking in Martindale for space lawyers, there are about 130 in the US.  The vast majority of these lawyers practiced space law in conjunction with many other areas of law - presumably ones that made money and allowed them the luxury of pretending to be space lawyers on the side.

"Wait," I hear the law schools cry.  "There's clearly a huge unmet need for space lawyers.  See how few of them there are?"

Don't fall into the trap.  There are only 130 space lawyers in the US because there's not enough work for more than 130 space lawyers.  I bet there's not enough work to support 13 full-time space lawyers, let alone 130, given the fact that most of them list many other practice areas in their bios.  (Note that there are many lawyers who work for space-related agencies and companies - NASA, Hughes, Intelsat, SpaceX, etc. - but they are not space lawyers; they are corporate lawyers, litigators, compliance attorneys, HR practitioners, the usual in-house types.  Working for a space-related company is not the same as being a space lawyer.)

To put this into perspective, other pie-in-the-sky vanity practice areas had the following hits in Martindale:

Entertainment - 7,464
Sports - 2,846
International - 16,952
Animal - 1,190
Restaurant - 405
Art - 325

And to put those figures into perspective, here's the Martindale numbers for some normal practice areas (all of which half of all law grads can't even get into):

Corporate - 106,972
Real estate - 113,733
Litigation - 243,788


For every space lawyer out there, there's an astronomical 1,000 real estate lawyers, and 2,000 litigators.  And 57 entertainment lawyers.

Attending law school with the goal of obtaining any law job is risky, given the fact that half of all law grads end up as unemployed lawyers.  Trying to narrow that down and obtain a job in a particular area of law is even riskier, whether it's litigation or corporate work, or some finer subcategory thereof.  But spending $50K on a higher law degree to obtain a job in a practice area that even art and animal lawyers consider to be a niche?  An area of law that is 1,000 times less common than real estate law, and 2,000 times less common than litigation?  Insanity.  Utter insanity, especially when considering the out-of-this-world cost of a US degree in space law.

As an interesting footnote to all of this, on my travels I did find one attorney listed on Martindale whose practice is like a law applicant's dream career.  Richard F. Martz, Jr., of Niceville, FL, manages to practice not only space law, but international law, arts and cultural heritage law, entertainment and music law, and sports law.  Clearly, a very, very busy man, probably very rich too with all those music stars and Oscar winners in his lobby each morning.  I can imagine being his secretary:

"Sorry, Mr. Joel, Richard is busy this morning with Tiger Woods.  And this afternoon he's booked up with Kevin Spacey and LeBron James.  Tomorrow?  Let me see...he can fit you in between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton at nine thirty, or at four in the afternoon right before Neil Armstrong.  Does that work?"