The Sea Casts Its Net of Justice Wide: A Speculative Judgment for What Has Been Left to the Waters of Despair

Using (among others) the frameworks of Black/African Science Fiction, Indigenous Knowledge, Earth Laws, and anticolonial logics, this judgment imagines the sea and its inhabitants addressing a petition against humanity for what it has thrown into the waters. Therefore, relying on ideas from the law and literature movement, the judgment is written in the form of a fictional ‘court case’, proceeding under the sea. Taking Gregson v Gilbert (1783), as its entry point, the petition that forms its focus includes, inter alia, prayers for remedies for harm from debris thrown overboard during armed conflict on the high seas, repair for oil spills in conflict and peacetime, justice for bodies left to the waters across space-time (including enslaved persons thrown overboard and refugees trying to get to Europe across the Mediterranean), as well as the cleaning up of plastic refuse on the ocean floor and in underwater life. By imagining the ocean, as well as its inhabitants, as sentient petitioners, this judgment explores a wide range of questions that trouble the capacity of Euro-modern law (fashioned to protect and regulate the accumulation of capital) as succour for the perils of the Anthropocene age.