Whaling: Law & the Market Economy

Abstract

This paper examines the whaling issue as it has developed as a dispute in the International Court of Justice between Japan and Australia and, now, New Zealand. While the likely legal outcome is that Japan does not have any enforceable obligations under the current whaling regime to abstain from the purportedly scientific whaling it is conducting in the Pacific and Southern Oceans, a purely legal analysis bypasses the domestic and international political economies which sustain Japanese whaling in the first place. This paper argues that the contentions over Japanese whaling are actually artifacts of the ideological dispute as to what a capitalist economy should look like, what types of economic activities should be off-limits in the developed world, and what role cultural norms play in the ordering of capitalist economic life. In examining the whaling question through a political economic lens, this paper advances the thesis that market forces, if allowed to operate freely, would be more efficacious in ending Japanese whaling than the current, inoperative legal framework through which Australia and New Zealand are attempting to enforce norms onto Japan.