Albericus Gentilis

1911 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Willing Balch
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
State Law ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
Pax Romana ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Law ◽  
Inter State

Modern international law is generally regarded as beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But it is necessary to go much further back in the history of the world for the beginnings of the law governing the intercourse of nations. The Greek states had a rudimentary inter-state law that regulated their relations. Thus they practiced arbitration in a way among themselves: they recognized the sanctity of the person of heralds, and they followed other recognized customs in their dealings one with another. When Rome and Carthage and other nations were struggling for the mastery of the world, the beginnings of a law of nations were recognized and practiced between them. Upon, however, practically all the known world coming under the sway of imperial Rome, all possibility as well as need of a law of nations was wanting, and as a result the faltering beginnings of an international law as recognized among the Greek states and then by the Powers surrounding the Mediterranean, were extinguished by the extension of the Pax Romana to all the known world.

The Authority of Vattel

1913 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles G. Fenwick
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Political Philosopher

There is no more significant commentary on the growth of international law, both in precision and in comprehensiveness, than an estimate of the relative authority of the name of Vattel in the world of international relations a century ago and in that of today. A century ago not even the name of Grotius himself was more potent in its influence upon questions relating to international law than that of Vattel. Vattel's treatise on the law of nations was quoted by judicial tribunals, in speeches before legislative assemblies, and in the decrees and correspondence of executive officials. It was the manual of the student, the reference work of the statesman, and the text from which the political philosopher drew inspiration. Publicists considered it sufficient to cite the authority of Vattel to justify and give conclusiveness and force to statements as to the proper conduct of a state in its international relations.At the present day the name and treatise of Vattel have both passed into the remoter field of the history of international law. It is safe to say that in no modern controversy over the existence and force of an alleged rule of international law would publicists seek to strengthen the position taken by them by quoting the authority of Vattel. As an exposition of the law of nations at a given period of its growth, the work can, it is true, lose nothing of its value, but in saying that it has thus won its place irrevocably among the classics of international law, we are merely repeating that it has lost its value as a treatise on the law of the present day.

The Use of Vattel in the American Law of Nations

2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Peace ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law

Although careful scholarly treatment of the history of international law is now thriving, within U.S. courts that history now begins with one eighteenth-century treatise published in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1758 and published in translation for modern readers under the aegis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1916. This treatise is Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains. My aim in this article is to appraise the elevation of Vattel to vaunted originalist heights in U.S. law. The claim that Vattel’s theory of the law of nations completely represents how the Founding Fathers (Founders) understood the law of nations should be rejected as a matter of history.

The Puritan Cosmopolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Significant Relation ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

This book traces the emergence of a sense of kinship with and belonging to a larger, more inclusive world within the law and literature of late seventeenth-century Puritanism. Connected to this cosmopolitanism in part through travel, trade, and politics, late seventeenth-century Puritans, it is argued, were also thinking in terms that went beyond these parameters about what it meant to feel affiliated with people in remote places—of which the Ottoman Empire is the best, but not the only example—and to experience what Bruce Robbins calls “attachment at a distance.” In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as “stand[ing] in an ethically significant relation” to people all around the world. The underlying source of these cosmopolitan predilections was the law, specifically the law of nations, often considered the precursor to international law. Through the terms for sovereignty, obligation, and society made available by a turn toward the cosmopolitan within the law, the Puritans experimented with concepts of extended obligation and ideas about a society consisting of all humans, not just those living on certain trade routes or within certain foreign communities. In mapping out these thought experiments, The Puritan Cosmopolis uncovers Puritans who were reconceptualizing war, contemplating new ways of cultivating peace, and rewriting the rules for being Puritan by internalizing legal theories about living in a larger, more inclusive world.

Some Problems in the History of the Law of Nations in Asia (1963)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

This chapter considers problems in the study of the history of the law of nations in Asia. It argues that international lawyers have focused their attention on the legal aspects of contemporary problems of international relations and politics, and on the operation of tribunals and quasi-tribunals and the case law they produce. Writers of present day treatises of international law devote just a few introductory pages to the history of the subject and these short chapters are often based on similar introductions in nineteenth-century treatises. The chapter discusses some of the elements of legal change in which European–Asian relations played a significant role; the gradual elimination of the natural law outlook by growing European positivism; the principle of universality of the law of nations and the principle of identity of de facto and de jure State sovereignty; and the use of capitulations to delay the ‘entry’ of Asian States into the family of nations.

The Law of Nations in Global History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Global History ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Regional Histories ◽  
International Rule

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the need to write a global history of law of nations that disengages from parochial national and regional histories. It is hoped that these developments will bring centre-stage the work of Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (1902–75), a scholar who was among the first to conceptualize the history of international law as that of intersecting histories of different regions of the world. Alexandrowicz was aware that, while the idea of writing a global history of law of nations is liberating, there is no guarantee that it will not become the handmaiden of contemporary and future imperial projects. What were needed were critical global histories that provincialize established Eurocentric historiographies and read them alongside other regional histories. This book aims to make Alexandrowicz’s writings more widely available and read. The Introduction to this book sums up the context, issues, problems, and questions that engaged Alexandrowicz, as well as some of his central theses. His writings are a gold mine waiting to be explored. Alexandrowicz contributed to the effort of promoting the idea of international rule of law by rejecting a Eurocentric history and theory of international law.

United States v. Dire

2013 ◽  
Vol 107 (3) ◽  
pp. 644-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Crime ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
Treaty Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The U.S

In the first criminal piracy decision by a United States court in nearly a century, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the federal piracy statute’s reference to the “law of nations” explicitly ties the scope of the offense to evolving customary international law definitions of the crime. The court went on to find that under current customary and treaty law, attempted piracy falls within the scope of the international crime. In doing so, it joined several courts in nations around the world that have confronted the issue as a result of the outbreak of Somali piracy that began in 2008.

scholarly journals The Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Nations Adopted by the American Institute of International Law

1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elihu Root
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
American Institute ◽  
Foreign Service ◽  
The People ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
International Events

With this meeting we finish the first decade of this Society. How great is the change of conditions in the field of international law during that period. Ten years ago all the governments of the world professed unqualified respect and obedience to the law of nations, and a very small number of persons not directly connected with government knew or cared anything about it. In this country at least international law was regarded as a rather antiquated branch of useless learning, diplomacy as a foolish mystery, and the foreign service as a superfluous expense. Now that governments have violated and flouted the law in many ways and with appalling consequences, the people of this country at least have begun to realize that observance of the law has a real and practical relation to the peace and honor of their own country and their own prosperity. They are beginning to take an interest in the subject, to discuss it in the newspapers, to inquire how observance of the law may be enforced. There appears a dawning consciousness that a democracy which undertakes to control its own foreign relations ought to know something about the subject. If we had not established this Society ten years ago to study and discuss and spread a knowledge of international law it would surely be demanded now, and we may be certain that our annual public discussions and the publication of the admirable Journal which we have always maintained, with its definite and certain informa-lion upon international events, its interesting and well informed discussion of international topics, and its supplements, with their wealth of authentic copies of international documents, have contributed materially towards fitting the people of our country to deal with the international situations which are before them.

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.

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