Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law

Abstract

2012 University of Illinois Law Review 405 (2012)In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo's founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a "data haven" for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo - and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet.The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns and .50-caliber machine guns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was implacably opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, however, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo's failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, the article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The "law' that was supposed to keep HavenCo safe was law only in a thin, formalistic sense, disconnected from the human institutions that make and enforce law. But without those institutions, law does not work, as HavenCo discovered.

Signs of Invisibility: Nonrecognition of Natural Environments as Persons in International and Domestic Law

“…Individuals or small groups of adherents during the past century have declared that they are sovereign nations but irrespective of creativity in designing flags, awarding themselves titles or issuing passports and other signifiers have not been recognised in domestic or international law and do not function as legal persons. Past pseudostates such as Sealand and the Principality of Hutt River thus remain curiosities rather than juridical realities [43]. Recent environmental activism such as the state of Aramoana, Glacier Republic and nation of Waveland might be dismissed as affirmations of a particular community and fodder for eventdriven journalism at the expense of substantive change [3,45].…”

Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness

“…The scale of laws is interestingly comparable to the scale of infrastructures. Micro-laws are possible, studied, for example, in work on social norms and practices of queuing (Reisman 1985), and a social practice may be one of laws even with only a few persons involved and very limited spatial reach (Grimmelmann 2012). Nonetheless, most of the laws relevant to infrastructures are spatially extensive.…”

Sealand and the Architecture of the Sea: From Counter-Space to Counter-Culture

“…Perhaps it was last used in 1978 when a group of German and Dutch men, led by Alexander Achenbacha former German citizen and a diamond dealerattempted to invade the fort, as a potential terra nullius to be occupied. 13 A crane, a flagpole, a radio antenna and a satellite dish stand out among the other objects on the deck. Upon Bates's occupation, the octagonal control tower and radar house were removed and replaced by a helipad.…”