Space—it may be the final frontier, but it’s not without lawyers. James E. Dunstan has spent more than 30 years specializing in space law—the rules, regulations and negotiations that surround mankind’s reach beyond Earth. The principal of Springfield, Virginia-based Mobius Legal Group, Dunstan is also a computer programmer who wrote the code for a moon rover platform system and a novelist whose chosen genre is, of course, science fiction.
Q. How did you get your start? Did you harbor secret dreams of being an astronaut?
A. I always wanted to be a lawyer, even as a young child. I got into Georgetown, and I started going down the corporate law track. But I was bored out of my mind. Georgetown happened to offer a class in outer space law, and I instantly fell in love with it. I founded the first student group in the country focused on space law, and I got lucky and lined up a position at a boutique firm where the founder had been one of the world’s first space lawyers.
Read more from Jenny B. Davis about James E. Dunstan.
Attribution: Illustration by Sam Ward; gallery created by Andy Lefkowitz.