Appropriating Nature: Commerce, Property, and the Commodification of Nature in the Law of Nations

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
ILEANA PORRAS
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Urgent Task ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Commodification Of Nature ◽  
The Right ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria

AbstractThis article explores the structural link between international law's long-standing doctrinal commitment to commerce and its inability to act decisively on behalf of the environment. One of the fundamental rights the early authors of jus gentium discovered was the right to engage in commerce. Francisco de Vitoria, Alberico Gentili, and Hugo Grotius each drew on and applied a providentialist theory of commerce. The doctrine held that Providence distributed scarcity and plenty across the earth so that peoples could not be self-sufficient, but would need to go in search of one another in order to acquire what they lacked. Commerce imagined in its pure form of reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange would be the means to bring separated mankind to friendship. The embrace of the providentialist doctrine by these early exponents of the law of nations, carried forward by Emer de Vattel, set the stage for international law's longstanding commitment to international commerce, viewed (despite all the distortions) as a virtuous activity that tends to the common good. The doctrine's additional legacy was the installation of a view of nature as commodity. The providentialist doctrine of commerce, adopted by the early authors of international law, remains embedded in the structure of international law and cannot easily be dislodged. Until this doctrine is dislodged, however, international law will continue to be hobbled in its ability to address the urgent task of protecting the natural environment.

The School of Salamanca

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Pagden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
School Of Salamanca ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ius Gentium ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria

The members of the so-called School of Salamanca (or “Second Scholastic,” as it is sometimes called) were, for the most part, the pupils, and the pupils of the pupils—from Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano to the great Jesuit metaphysicians Luís de Molina and Francisco Suárez—of Francisco de Vitoria, who held the Prime Chair of Theology at Salamanca between 1526 and his death in 1546. Although they are often described vaguely as “theologians and jurists,” they were all, in fact, theologians. In the early modern world, theology, the “mother of sciences,” was considered to be above all other modes of inquiry, and covered everything that belongs to what today is called jurisprudence, as well as most of moral and political philosophy, and what would later become the human sciences. This article focuses on the Salamanca theologians' discussion of the law of nature—the ius naturae—and of the law of nations (ius gentium), for which reason Vitoria has often been referred to (along with Hugo Grotius) as the “father of international law.”

The Right to Democracy in the Americas

1998 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heraldo Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Higher Law

In his insightful book On the Law of Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan states that international law “is not higher law or better law; it is existing law. It is not a law that eschews force; such a view is alien to the very idea of law. Often as not it is the law of the victor; but it is law withal and does evolve” (Moynihan 1990, 19).

Beyond the Law. The Image of Piracy in the Legal Writings of Hugo Grotius

Grotiana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-395
Author(s):  
Michael Kempe
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
Two Sides

AbstractIt is still underestimated to what extent in his main works Hugo Grotius not only sketched and developed a system of private, state and international law; but also outlined a general philosophy or theory of law. By asking questions concerning the law of property, the law of prize and booty, the law of peace and war or the legal status of sovereignty he did not only refer to the 'right side', i.e. to actions that can be labelled as rightful and legal. He also dealt with many aspects of what is not right and unlawful, not limiting himself to just give mere examples of crossing the border to the 'non right side'. It was a part of Grotius's methodological approach to systematically reflect on the law from the perspective of its violations. One example of such a violation is the act of piracy and the figure of the pirate. To outline this is the aim of the following article. By showing that the pirate and his 'legal twin', the privateer, were belong together as two sides of the same coin, they come to symbolise in an exemplary way the differentiation between 'right' and 'non right' as the unity of law in the legal philosophy of Grotius.

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.

Rewriting the History of the Law of Nations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria

In the interwar years, international lawyer James Brown Scott wrote a series of works on the history of his discipline. He made the case that the foundation of modern international law rested not, as most assumed, with the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, but with sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria. Far from being an antiquarian assertion, the Spanish origin narrative placed the inception of international law in the context of the discovery of America, rather than in the European wars of religion. The recognition of equal rights to the American natives by Vitoria was the pedigree on which Scott built a progressive international law, responsive to the rise of the United States as the leading global power and developments in international organization such as the creation of the League of Nations. The book describes the Spanish origin project in context, relying on Scott’s biography, changes in the self-understanding of the international legal profession, as well as on larger social and political trends in US and global history. Keeping in mind Vitoria’s persisting role as a key figure in the canon of international legal history, the book sheds light on the contingency of shared assumptions about the discipline and their unspoken implications. The legacy of the international law Scott developed for the American century is still with the profession today, in the shape of the normalization and de-politicization of rights language and of key concepts like equality and rule of law.

Hugo Grotius on Ethics and War

1998 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 639-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Forde
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Law And Ethics ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law

Interest in the thought of Hugo Grotius on international law and ethics is justified inasmuch as he attempted to define a theoretical position between an idealism he thought counterproductive and an amoral realism he found unacceptable. Grotius constructed a system in which the moral authority of natural law was combined with the flexibility of human law. This required him to develop a special understanding of the nature and relation of these two types of law. In giving the law of nations, as a product of human will, the authority to suspend provisions of natural law, he provided for a code of international conduct that could permit injustice where necessary, without abandoning moral ideals altogether.

The Obligation to Afford Reparation to Injured Individuals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Ferstman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Human Rights Treaties ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Access ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the consequences of breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law for the responsible international organizations. It concentrates on the obligations owed to injured individuals. The obligation to make reparation arises automatically from a finding of responsibility and is an obligation of result. I analyse who has this obligation, to whom it is owed, and what it entails. I also consider the right of individuals to procedures by which they may vindicate their right to a remedy and the right of access to a court that may be implied from certain human rights treaties. In tandem, I consider the relationship between those obligations and individuals’ rights under international law. An overarching issue is how the law of responsibility intersects with the specialized regimes of human rights and international humanitarian law and particularly, their application to individuals.

Hobbes among the Classic Jurists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Boucher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Complete Identification ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Hedley Bull ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

The classic foundational status that Hobbes has been afforded by contemporary international relations theorists is largely the work of Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight, and Hedley Bull. They were not unaware that they were to some extent creating a convenient fiction, an emblematic realist, a shorthand for all of the features encapsulated in the term. The detachment of international law from the law of nature by nineteenth-century positivists opened Hobbes up, even among international jurists, to be portrayed as almost exclusively a mechanistic theorist of absolute state sovereignty. If we are to endow him with a foundational place at all it is not because he was an uncompromising realist equating might with right, on the analogy of the state of nature, but instead to his complete identification of natural law with the law of nations. It was simply a matter of subject that distinguished them, the individual and the state.

A Moving Target

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Webb
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Moving Target ◽  
International Court Of Justice ◽  
European Court ◽  
International Court ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
International Law Commission ◽  
Right Of Access ◽  
National Practice

The last 50 years have seen significant changes in the law of immunity. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has, over the past 15 years in particular, played an influential role in the law applicable to this ‘moving target’. This chapter examines three approaches of the ECtHR to the identification of general international law: (i) the ECtHR looking to the International Court of Justice; (ii) the ECtHR looking to national practice; and (iii) the ECtHR looking to the work of the International Law Commission and the provisional application of treaties. Although the ECtHR strives to locate itself within general international law, it necessarily approaches the immunities of States, officials, and international organizations through the lens of Article 6 ECHR and whether the immunity in question constitutes a legitimate and proportionate restriction on the right of access to court. This has, at times, taken the Court down a different path to other judicial bodies and we can identify the emergence of a ‘European approach’ to the role of immunity in employment disputes.

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