Law Commons^™

Whales: Their Emerging Right To Life, Anthony D'Amato, Sudhir K. Chopra

Faculty Working Papers

We have contended in this article that the evolution of the opinio juris of nations has encompassed five, and perhaps six, inexorable qualitative stages: free resource, regulation, conservation, protection, preservation and entitlement. We have argued that assigning whales an entitlement to life is the consequence of an emerging humanist right in international law — an example of the merging of the "is" and the "ought" of the law in the process of legitimization