O. Shane Balloun

O. Shane Balloun is a maritime and admiralty lawyer and a member of the board of directors of The Seasteading Institute. In 2012 he published The True Obstacle to the Autonomy of Seasteads: American Law Enforcement Jurisdiction over Homesteads on the High Seas in the University of San Francisco Maritime Law Journal, the first law review article devoted to the subject.

That paper is the reason the legal side of seasteading has a starting point at all, and its answer was not the one enthusiasts expected. The binding constraint on an autonomous seastead is not the law of the sea as such but the reach of American law enforcement jurisdiction over vessels and structures with any tie to the United States, which is wide enough that flagging and distance do not settle the question on their own.

He practises in western Washington, where he is the shareholder of Balloun Law Professional Corporation at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal and of counsel to Johns Law Group, working on admiralty and maritime matters, complex corporate structures, trusts and estates, and civil litigation and appeals. He is admitted in five states and before federal courts including the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.

He came to law from technology. He read mathematics at Cornell, worked in the hard disk drive industry and then at Google, where he was on the teams that launched Gmail and Google Product Search, and took his law degree with honour at the University of Wyoming, where he was inducted into the Order of the Coif. His LL.M. in Admiralty, taken with distinction at Tulane, was held as a Maritime Law Fellow.