2026 National Rounds of the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition

International space law emerged from Cold War anxieties about the militarization of the new frontier opened by Sputnik in 1957. The United Nations responded by establishing the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 1959, which produced the foundational 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST). The OST declared space the 'province of all mankind,' prohibited national appropriation of celestial bodies, banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and assigned state responsibility for national activities, including those of private actors. It was complemented by four further instruments: the 1968 Rescue Agreement, the 1972 Liability Convention, the 1975 Registration Convention, and the 1979 Moon Agreement, the last of which attracted few ratifications and remains contested. The legal regime was designed for a small club of state launchers, but space activity has since diversified dramatically. Mega-constellations such as Starlink, the rise of commercial launch providers, lunar return programs including Artemis and Chang'e, planned asteroid and lunar resource extraction, and counterspace capabilities demonstrated by destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) tests have all outpaced existing rules. The 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act and similar laws in Luxembourg, the UAE, and Japan asserted domestic rights to space resources, while the U.S.-led Artemis Accords and the China-Russia International Lunar Research Station offer competing interpretive frameworks for lunar governance. Today, debate focuses on whether the OST regime can absorb these pressures or requires new instruments. UN COPUOS Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines (adopted 2019) address orbital debris and traffic coordination, while the Working Group on Space Resources is drafting recommended principles. Negotiations on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) at the Conference on Disarmament remain deadlocked, and liability for collisions, cyber interference with satellites, and large-constellation interference with astronomy remain unresolved. The Manfred Lachs problem set traditionally requires delegates to apply these treaties to fact patterns involving private actors, dual-use technology, and contested resource rights.

Modern public international law traces its lineage to the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and the writings of Grotius, but its institutional form is largely a twentieth-century creation. The League of Nations (1920) and its successor the United Nations (1945) established the prohibition on the use of force, the principle of sovereign equality, and a framework of multilateral treaty-making. The Statute of the International Court of Justice codified the recognized sources of international law in Article 38: treaties, customary international law, general principles, and, as subsidiary means, judicial decisions and scholarly writings. Subsequent decades produced specialized regimes governing human rights, the law of the sea (UNCLOS, 1982), trade (GATT/WTO), international criminal accountability (the ad hoc tribunals and the 1998 Rome Statute), and the environment. For the purposes of a space law moot, the general international law backdrop is essential because the lex specialis of the OST regime sits atop default rules on treaty interpretation (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969), state responsibility (ILC Articles, 2001), jurisdiction, attribution of private conduct, and dispute settlement. Concepts such as due diligence, the no-harm principle articulated in Trail Smelter and Corfu Channel, and countermeasures regularly surface when adjudicating cross-border harms in orbit or on celestial bodies. The ICJ's advisory and contentious jurisdiction, arbitration under the PCA, and dispute mechanisms embedded in sectoral treaties provide the procedural architecture moot teams must navigate. Contemporary international law faces significant strain. Great-power competition has weakened the Security Council, the WTO Appellate Body remains paralyzed, and challenges to universal jurisdiction and ICC authority continue. At the same time, new domains — cyberspace, artificial intelligence, the deep seabed, and outer space — test whether existing customary rules can be extended by analogy or whether fresh treaty-making is required. Debates over fragmentation, the persistent objector doctrine, and the binding force of soft-law instruments such as UN General Assembly resolutions and COPUOS guidelines are particularly relevant when moot problems blur the line between emerging norms and established law.