Examines the implementation of marine law: rulemaking, permitting, enforcement, judicial review, and the administrative discretion that determines what a statute means in practice.
The organizing argument is that most governance failure is not failure of law. A rule administered by an agency with limited staff, a large jurisdiction and competing statutory obligations produces outcomes that the drafting text does not predict. The course works through case material in which the written rule and the applied rule diverge, and identifies the mechanisms responsible.
Co-management arrangements receive extended treatment. Students analyze cases in which shared authority succeeded and failed, and identify the conditions that distinguish them.
Assessment includes drafting a public comment on a live rulemaking.