"Waves of Freedom": Kant and the Right to Rescue on the High Seas

This Article draws upon the legal philosophy of Immanuel Kant to argue that all seafarers—from stateless migrants to billionaires on mega-yachts—possess legal rights to rescue on the high seas. These rights are of the kind legal practitioners call “human rights,” and correspond to obligations enforceable against the flag state of any Coast Guard, naval, or other “public” vessel receiving the seafarers’ distress signals. A second, corollary claim is that we must abandon the “Grotian” model of the seas as commons and view them instead as “global public goods” that the international legal order always already maintains through institutions for the public freedom of everyone, everywhere, forever.