by Justice William W. Bedsworth

They told me the theme of this issue would be space law. They were quick to add that they weren’t referring to the area between my ears.

Having removed my brain from the list of possible topics,¹ I find myself desperately trying to figure out how space law is going to work.

So thank you for reading this column. I’ll be busy reading the rest of the magazine trying to go from Stygian ignorance to plain old Bedsworthian ignorance.

But I’m required to write this column without the benefit of the education I’ll get from that experience. That’s not gonna be easy. I expected a steep learning curve but this one’s been really steep for my pre-Copernican mind. CEQA-level steep.

This surprised me. I thought learning about space law would require me just to look at a few Vehicle Code statutes. Maybe talk to the president of a homeowner’s association or two. Imagine my surprise when I found out we weren’t talking about parking space law.

Or closet space. Or storage space. Or space keys on phones, which I am forever missing and hitting “b” or “n” instead. I couldneasilybwriteba column on that.

No, we’re talking about SPACE space. What used to be called “outer space,” until some fifth-grader asked where “inner space” ended and “outer space” began, and we changed the terminology out of sheer embarrassment.

So here’s what I think you need to know. Space law is the ultimate admiralty law challenge. We are, after all, talking about extra-terrestrial stuff, about vast spaces with only little dots of “land” scattered about in them.

Space is the Pacific Ocean on steroids. That sounds like admiralty law to me.

I know nothing about admiralty law. I’ll pause here so you can make your own joke about how little that differs from what I know about other areas of the law.

You wanna know how accurate I am when I say I know nothing about admiralty law? I once performed a wedding on a boat, and we were thinking that we had to do this within three miles of the shore so that I would have jurisdiction.

Turns out that three-mile limit (an antiquated concept based on how far cannons could fire) is outmoded and has generally been replaced by a twelve-mile limit.²

Using my admiralty law model, I figure spatial jurisdiction is also related to how far you are from land. According to the AI gremlin that now pops up on all my web searches, “Space begins at the Karman Line, approximately sixty-two miles (100 kilometers) above earth.”

So, if our rocket ship collides with a Chinese rocket ship beneath the Karman Line, earth law would be applied and the outcome would be global war, whereas if the collision takes place more than sixty-two miles from earth, space law would be applied and the outcome would be global war.

But it’s not all going to be that easy. If it were, you wouldn’t need a genius like me to explain it to you.

Let me show you how complicated it could get. Suppose you’re suing beings from the planet Zortan 7. You’re trying to obtain long-arm jurisdiction, based on the Zortanians’ previous contacts with California.

So you hire an investigator to round up all the people who’ve been abducted by the Zortanians in the past . . . oh, say five years. Of course, you end up with a witness list longer than Taylor Swift’s Instagram followers list, and you have to sort out the most credible and effective witnesses.

Then, you have to track down a couple of experts to testify to the thoughtless damage caused by the Zortanians’ crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.³ It’ll be great to dirty up your opponent with previous bad conduct, but you have to be very careful choosing experts about alien landings; some are not good on the witness stand.

Anyway, you can see how the costs of putting this case together can multiply very quickly. Then, of course, you have to deal with all the technical legal problems.

Where do you sue? Do you sue in state court where you have most of your experience, or do you file the case in federal court where the judges have better security and would therefore be more difficult for the Zortanians to abduct? You sure as hell have diversity jurisdiction, so you have a call to make right away.

Does the fact your defendants are not miles away but light years away affect the statute of limitations? This issue will require more time—and more money—spent on research. How deep are your earthling client’s pockets?

And what about service of process? The Zortanians are notoriously elusive. Once they get wind of your lawsuit, they’re not coming anywhere near the sixty-two-mile limit.

Trying to affect personal service on a defendant who is light years away is not practicable. Hell, paying for your investigator to go to Roswell took a bite out of the budget. Zortan 7 is out of the question.

As is service by mail. Have you noticed how long it takes a letter to get from here to the East Coast these days? Imagine trying to get one to the Zortan System. Besides, the weight of the stamps on your envelope would make the document so heavy you couldn’t afford the postage.⁴

That means you’re left with service by publication. But what publication is reasonably calculated to be read by the Zortanians? Only ones I can think of are the San Bernardino SUN and the San Jose MERCURY News.

Then, you’ve got to line up translators for the parties and your witnesses. Good luck with that.

I once had a case where we needed two Cambodian translators, and it took five days to set up. Beings fluent in English and Zortanian are thin on the ground.⁵

These cases are going to be a nightmare. I hope this will serve as a primer, and you can read the rest of the magazine right along with me for fuller explication of these problems.

I’m greatly looking forward to having my horizons—so to speak—broadened. Lord knows they need it. Heck, I’m hopelessly 20th Century. I would have ruled in favor of Pluto’s application for planethood.

BEDS NOTES

1. Admit it: If you’ve read my stuff much, you’d be fascinated by a discussion of how my brain works.
2. Except for the Gulf of America, which as I understand it, now belongs entirely to the Mar-a-Lago Resort.
3. No, you’re not the first to point out that the alien arrival coincided with the year of my birth.
4. This one made my mind boggle a little. As you keep adding stamps, the notice gets heavier and requires more postage, right. Which means more stamps. Which makes it heavier. Which means more stamps. I lost the entire third quarter of a football game working on this one.
5. You better hope your defendants don’t speak a problematic dialect like the one spoken in Zortan 7’s southern hemisphere’s acidic iron oxide mud lake district.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.