Blue Legal focuses on areas of law that can lead to systemic change. We do not work in isolation, collaborating with major law firms, leading lawyers and academics, and other civil society organisations. Their expertise has enabled us to cover areas from international subsidies to the constitutions of small island states, and arcane corners of property law.
Blue Legal’s approach is to support civil institutions, only resorting to court action when absolutely necessary. When the UK brought in fisheries management measures to protect sand-eels – the base of the North Sea food chain – the EU accused it of breaching the Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement, in the first case of its kind. In 2025, we filed an amicus curae brief to the advise the Tribunal, supporting the UK’s position. The arbitrators sided with our interpretation that UK environmental law could be imposed on EU vessels in British waters. The sand-eel and the vast range of marine life dependent on it were saved!
In 2022 we threatened the UK government with legal action for failing to bring in fisheries management measures across its offshore marine protected areas. The government settled out of court and adopted our legal position. The UK has since brought in a suite of measures, starting with a bottom trawl ban on its portion of the Dogger Bank, an area half the size of Wales.
Blue Legal also researches laws and supports our project teams, other NGOs and community groups. Conservation projects require legal support that can include: property rights in fishing quota; the role of traditional laws in decision-making at sea; competition law; complex rules against state aid; and even the law of the World Trade Organisation.
Where we can, we provide open access to our legal research. With leading international experts we recently published a research paper investigating the effectiveness of EU marine environmental law and another signalling poor quota allocation in the UK and elsewhere.
To date, Blue Legal has operated in approaching 50 different jurisdictions.
