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.

Natural Law in Early Modern Legal Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ibbetson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Hugo Grotius

Natural law thinking in the early modern world had two principal roots: Greco-Roman moral philosophy and Roman law. These two strands came together in sixteenth-century Spain, from where they influenced the Dutchman Hugo Grotius. Grotius can be seen as the channel through which this thinking reached a pan-European audience. His works, and the works of his followers, came to have an enormous influence on the development of legal thought and practice after the seventeenth century. Ideas of natural law were no longer regarded as dependent on God’s will. A rational structure could be derived from self-evident premises in the law of nature and identification of concrete rules of natural law was regarded as the work of human reason. These features, coupled with its seeming moral objectivity, allowed natural law to provide a template for positive legal systems, and fuelled the move towards codification of law in eighteenth-century Europe.

scholarly journals Prve kršćanske zajednice / First Christian communities

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-193
Author(s):  
Drago Župarić
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Roman Province ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
New Religion

Christianity, having developed in a Jewish setting, quickly separated from Judaism and opened itself to the aspirations of the Greco-Roman world. This paper will explore the first Christian communities in Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome, from whence Christianity spread to the ends of the Mediterranean basin, that is to say, through the Roman Empire. Each of the aforementioned  communities, which were very well respected, will be discussed with regards to  the date of their foundation, the source material concerning these communities, and their prominent characteristics. In other words, this paper will discuss  the spread of Christianity, with reference to the question of the triumphant  campaign of the young Church from Jerusalem to Rome. After the acceptance of pagans into their communities, Christianity as a new religion began to gain importance, and the number of adherents grew quickly. The Christian community was declared an opposition to imperial government, and was already heavily repressed by the mid-1  century. The communities that survived repression sought peace; that is, collaboration between the  Roman state and the “early Church”, which was seen as a new institution. The  cult opened itself more and more to the outside world and different cultures,  which led to the mingling of Christians and pagans, leading to many theological disputes, especially concerning the “divinity” of Jesus Christ. Between the 1st  and 2nd st  century the beginnings of Christianity should be viewed as an organization in which commissions and administrations are present, as the number of believers grew and the need for better organization arose. The basis of the rapid expansion of Christianity in the old world should  certainly be viewed in its universality. The author of this paper touches upon  the question of the beginnings of Christianity in Dalmatia and Pannonia, side by side with Roman culture. Christianity was not very influential in the Roman province of Dalmatia until the mid-3  century, even though it is likely that there were smaller Christian groups here, as well as organized Christian communities.

The Oxford Handbook of the Law of the Sea

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Maritime Boundary ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Selden ◽  
Operational Issues ◽  
Maritime Boundary Delimitation ◽  
Oceans Management

Human activities have taken place in the world's oceans and seas for most of human history. With such a vast number of ways in which the oceans can be used for trade, exploited for natural resources and fishing, as well as concerns over maritime security, the legal systems regulating the rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world's oceans have long been a crucial part of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea comprehensively defined the parameters of the law of the sea in 1982, and since the Convention was concluded it has seen considerable development. This book provides an analysis of its current debates and controversies, both theoretical and practical. It consists of forty chapters divided into six parts. First, it explains the origins and evolution of the law of the sea, with a particular focus upon the role of key publicists such as Hugo Grotius and John Selden, the gradual development of state practice, and the creation of the 1982 UN Convention. It then reviews the components which comprise the maritime domain, assessing their definition, assertion, and recognition. It also analyzes the ways in which coastal states or the international community can assert control over areas of the sea, and the management and regulation of each of the maritime zones. This includes investigating the development of the mechanisms for maritime boundary delimitation, and the decisions of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The book also discusses the actors and intuitions that impact on the law of the sea, considering their particular rights and interests, in particular those of state actors and the principle law of the sea institutions. Then it focuses on operational issues, investigating longstanding matters of resource management and the integrated oceans framework. This includes a discussion and assessment of the broad and increasingly influential integrated oceans management governance framework that interacts with the traditional law of the sea. It considers six distinctive regions that have been pivotal to the development of the law of the sea, before finally providing a detailed analysis of the critical contemporary issues facing the law of the sea. These include threatened species, climate change, bioprospecting, and piracy.

Seldenism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Visconsi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Table Talk ◽  
Great Scholar ◽  
John Selden

The great scholar and legal thinker John Selden was a subject of contested memory in the politically turbulent years following his death. This article reads the collection Table-Talk as a work of popular constitutional commentary specifically designed to advance, for lay audiences, the scholar’s quasi-Erastian vision of religious toleration and the proper relations between church and state. Selden, in this account, is made legible for all readers as an early voice skeptical of priestcraft and as a leading figure in the doctrines coalescing around the functional separation of church and state in the later seventeenth century.

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.

Women, Children, and Slaves in Rabbinic Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 488-504
Author(s):  
Catherine Hezser
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rabbinic Law

Rabbinic law on women, children, and slaves developed on the basis of biblical law and in the context of the Greco-Roman and Sasanian cultural environments in which Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis lived. The discussions were innovative in their adaptation of biblical law to new circumstances. From a sociological point of view, women, children, and slaves were dependents of the householder who were generally associated with the private sphere of the household. At the same time, they differed from each other with regard to honor, which only free persons possessed, and with regard to gender, since male children were raised to become Torah-observant male Jews themselves. Palestinian rabbinic law shows interesting similarities with and differences to Roman law of which rabbis would have been aware even if direct influences cannot be established.

Table Talk of John Selden

1928 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 688
Author(s):  
W. R. Vance ◽  
Frederick Pollock ◽  
Edward Fry
Keyword(s):  
Table Talk ◽  
John Selden

The Revenge of John Selden: The Draft Convention on the Law of the Sea in the Light of Hugo Grotius' Mare Liberum

Grotiana ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Logue
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Final Version ◽  
The Third ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Draft Convention ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Selden

AbstractOn April 30, 1982, the Eleventh Session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) endorsed the final version of the Draft Convention of the Law of the Sea by a vote of 130 to 4, with 17 abstentions.1 The Session met at UN Headquarters in New York from March 8 to April 30.2

scholarly journals The Rhetoric of Hobbes's Translation of Thucydides

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Chris Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Modern Project ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Right Reason

Abstract In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty. Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves similar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides, Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving, and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as “right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “enlightenment,” while rhetoric constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned. Hobbes's contribution to this project theorizes rhetoric as a barrier to individual calculations of interest, placing a novel constraint on political life.

The Philosophy of a Christian Virtuoso iii

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Ethical System ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
The Law

The question why Locke failed to publish an ethical system, notwithstanding the value he placed on the moral life, is raised and its answer postponed. Locke’s thoughts about ethics expressed in the Essay and other writings are examined, their sources identified, and the systematic connections between them are considered. Hellenistic sources, especially Epicurean ones, are identified, along with the ethical rationalism and naturalism of Hugo Grotius. Following Grotius, Locke developed a theory of the law of nature, rooted in social convenience, but sanctioned by divine command. In Some Thoughts concerning Education, Locke advocated the cultivation of virtues suitable to the moral and civic life of a gentleman. His abortive attempt to develop a system of ethics in ‘Of Ethics in General’, intended as a chapter of the Essay, but abandoned, brings the reader back to the opening question. Locke concluded that revelation is a more reliable source of moral knowledge.

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