Legal Research

The Law of. . . Pond Scum?

By Simon Fodden

Just when you thought every niche had been filled, up comes an area of practice to remind you that this is a more wrinkled world than we are typically aware and the practice of law is a force second only to life itself, perhaps, when it comes to occupying all imaginable spaces: there is a law of algae.

It occupies a website, too, of course, which, appropriately is LawOfAlgae.com, a.k.a. Stoel Rives LLP, a Minneapolis firm specializing in renewable energy. Which is where algae comes in. Evidently it is an up-and-coming source of biomass from which to make fuel, and bids fair to become the source in a decade, as technology continues to improve the energy-in / energy-out ratio.

The Law of Algae site is presented as a book which takes you through the various (and predictable) legal issues involved in establishing and running an industry — e.g. “Financing Your Algae Biofuels Project” and “Intellectual Property Issues”.

Turns out that Stoel Rives is good at inhabiting a legal niche and giving it a stamp of their own. Over the prior five years they have published other online books to announce and give form to The Law Of Wind, Lava Law, The Law Of Ocean And Tidal Energy, and the delightfully named (even if it does mix Latin and Greek) Lex Helius, otherwise, and prosaically, The Law Of Solar Energy.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 08, 2009 (boomark / email).