The Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative closed its Deep-Sea Round-Up of 11 June 2026 with a feature on a course I teach.
Coding Nature is a Legal Challenge course for first-year LLB students at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law. Over a semester, three groups worked as legal advisers to DOALOS and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on one of the least settled questions in ocean governance: what happens to the rules on access and benefit-sharing for marine genetic resources when bioprospecting moves from the ship and the sample jar to the database and the algorithm. They analysed the BBNJ Agreement, the TRIPS and WIPO GRATK regimes, and EU Regulation 511/2014, and proposed concrete ways forward.
That is also the subject of my own research, and it is not a settled field. The students were not rehearsing an answer that already exists. They were working on a question the delegations themselves are still arguing about.
DOSI is the international expert network on deep-ocean governance, and the Round-Up reaches marine scientists and policy specialists around the world. The feature came at the initiative of DOSI’s communications team, which is the part I keep coming back to: a scientific network decided, on its own judgment, that work done by first-year law students belonged in front of people who do this for a living.
The feature is the closing item of the Deep-Sea Round-Up of 11 June 2026.
Henrique Marcos 