International Law and Ancient Sources: Grotius and Selden

1973 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Ziskind
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
International Law ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
John Selden

During the Commercial Revolution, as European powers became deeply involved in Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade, there developed a lively debate about whether a country could claim and exercise legal sovereignty over the sea. The great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), in his work Mare Liberum (1609), argued against such notions. An English lawyer and polymath John Selden (1584–1654), espousing British interests, took the affirmative side of the debate in Mare Clausum (1936). The issues had been discussed long before Grotius and Selden had written their works, but the debate intensified as the competition both for worldwide markets and for access to offshore fishing banks became sharper.

The Law of Nations and the Sources of the Cosmopolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
International Law ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Selden

The Puritans’ cosmopolitan thought in late seventeenth-century New England had its source in the cosmopolitanism of a law of nations that was as much about the world as a whole as it was about the nation-state it later came to epitomize. With the nation-state not yet a consolidated entity, the seventeenth-century law of nations was far more open-ended than the international law to which it gave rise more than a century later. In the absence of a fixed idea of sovereignty, the law of nations was able to articulate multiple historical possibilities for social, political, and legal communities, one of which—the cosmopolitan—is fundamental. The cosmopolis emerges as a central part of the intellectual project of the law of nations put forth by the Protestant thinkers Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, with the main features of the law recast as the building blocks of the cosmopolis.

John Selden and the Jewish Religious Fountainhead of the International Law of the Sea

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofir Haivry
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Maritime Law ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Sea Bed ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Dramatic Rise ◽  
Limited Application ◽  
John Selden ◽  
Technological Limitations

Modern international maritime law (IML) was born primarily out of two works, written about 400 years ago: Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius, which argued for a complete freedom of the seas; and Mare Clausum (1635), by John Selden (1584–1654) arguing for the principle and practice of dominion and ownership over tracts of sea. Until relatively recently IML tended far more towards Grotius, since technological limitations limited application of Selden’s view mainly to the concept of the ‘territorial waters’. However, in the last three decades, as technological advances enable the establishment of far wider areas of maritime control and ever more ambitious finds of resources lying under the sea-bed, there has been a dramatic rise in the import of John Selden’s ideas for IML.

scholarly journals Indian Ocean trade connections: characterization and commercial routes of torpedo jars

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Lischi ◽  
Eleonora Odelli ◽  
Jhashree L. Perumal ◽  
Jeannette J. Lucejko ◽  
Erika Ribechini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade

Self-Determination during the Cold War: UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), the Prohibition of Partition, and the Establishment of the British Indian Ocean Territory (1965)

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Kattan
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Africa ◽  
International Law ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
South West ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Un General Assembly

This article uses the history of partition to assess when self-determination became a rule of customary international law prohibiting partition as a method of decolonization. In so doing it revisits the partitions of Indochina, Korea, India, Palestine, Cyprus, South Africa, and South West Africa, and explains that UN practice underwent a transformation when the UN General Assembly opposed the United Kingdom’s partition proposals for Cyprus in 1958. Two years later, the UN General Assembly condemned any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country in Resolution 1514 (1960). The illegality of partition under customary international law was raised during the second phase of the South West Africa Cases (1960–1966) in respect of South Africa’s homelands policy, but the International Court of Justice (ICJ) infamously did not address the merits of those cases. The illegality of partition was also raised in the arbitration between the United Kingdom and Mauritius over the establishment of the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965. Like the ICJ in the South West Africa Cases, the Arbitral Tribunal decided that it did not have jurisdiction to address the legality of the British excision of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, even though the legality of the excision was argued at length between counsels for Mauritius and the United Kingdom in their oral pleadings and written statements. However, in their joint dissenting opinion, Judge Rüdiger Wolfrum and Judge James Kateka expressed their opinion that self-determination had developed before 1965, and that consequently the partition was unlawful. This paper agrees that selfdetermination prohibited the partition of Mauritius to establish the British Indian Ocean Territory, a new colony, in 1965 although self-determination probably did not emerge as a rule of customary international law until the adoption of the human rights covenants in 1966, after the excision of the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, but before the passage of the Mauritius Independence Act in 1968.

John Selden

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason P. Rosenblatt
Keyword(s):  
Charles I ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Table Talk ◽  
John Selden ◽  
Rabbinic Law ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Westminster Assembly

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

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