Abstract Marine genetic resources (MGRs) sit at the centre of emerging biotechnological innovation, yet the international legal regimes governing their access, use, and benefit-sharing remain fragmented and often contradictory. This article operationalizes Hohfeld’s relational framework to map the legal relations embedded in six core instruments that regulate MGRs: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. The resulting Hohfeldian mapping shows how claim-rights, obligations, powers, and other legal positions are distributed across these regimes, revealing overlapping and sometimes competing legal logics within MGR governance. This approach clarifies the relational structure of these legal positions and highlights how legal form shapes, and occasionally obscures, the exercise of authority, the creation of regulatory gaps, and the persistence of asymmetries, particularly in relation to benefit-sharing and the treatment of digital sequence information. The analysis draws on a manually curated, machine-readable dataset that serves as a resource for further research. The article places the legal governance of MGRs within wider debates on the international law of global commons and sets out a methodological scaffold for comparative and critical legal analysis. It ultimately invites a reconsideration of who owns and who owes what within the evolving governance of MGRs.
Marcos et al. (Mon,) studied this question.