ABSTRACT
The law has material effects on the world, and the material world shapes the law. This co-constitutive relationship is most clearly observed at sea, where the particular materiality of the oceans allows for and demands legal creativity. This chapter examines a particular example of international law’s world-making effects, and the ways physical geography pushes back, in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases. Here we see the power of law to overwrite and away from geographical fact. But geography, and the sea, are forever returning, and understanding a specific example of how law and the sea collide, thus providing far reaching insight into the dynamic relationship between law and space.
