The American Society of International Law 1906–1956

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Finch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Jay Treaty ◽  
American Society

The founding fifty years ago of a society to promote the establishment of international relations on the basis of law and justice was a step marking the progress that had been made at the beginning of the century in the age-long efforts to find a means of substituting reason for force in the settlement of international controversies. At that time arbitration was generally regarded as the most suitable and acceptable substitute for war. Great Britain and the United States had both heavily contributed to that conviction first by submitting to arbitration under the Jay Treaty of 1794 the numerous misunderstandings that developed in carrying out the provisions of the Peace Treaty of 1783, and then three-quarters of a century later in submitting to arbitration by the Treaty of Washington of 1871 the dangerous Alabama Claims dispute following the American Civil War.

The Power of Legitimacy and the Legitimacy of Power: International Law in an Age of Power Disequilibrium

2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Franck
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
International Court ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Pan American ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
American Society

The American Society of International Law (ASIL), incorporated by Act of Congress in 1950, was founded in 1906 “to promote the establishment and maintenance of international relations on the basis of law and justice.” As we celebrate the centennial of this, the Society’s principal publication, it is appropriate to examine the present and future prospects of this project. Is it still a compelling aspiration in the era of U.S. superpower-dom?The founding of the Society and initiation of the Journal (AJIL) must be seen in the context of the then-prevalent American commitment to the idea that a world of international law and international tribunals would be a natural, even historically inevitable, extrapolation of a good American idea. Speaking in 1890 to the first Pan-American Conference, President Benjamin Harrison congratulated the delegates on formulating a hemispheric arbitration agreement. “We rejoice,” he said, “that you have found in the organization of our Government something suggestive and worthy of imitation.” At The Hague in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root, the founding president of the ASIL, called for the creation of an international court “which would pass upon questions between nations with the same impartial and impersonal judgment that the Supreme Court of the United States gives to questions arising between citizens of the different States.”

scholarly journals Gone with the War? Neutral State Responsibility and the Geneva Arbitration of 1872

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
State Responsibility ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Neutral State

The Geneva Arbitration of 1872 was convened to settle various differences between the United States and Great Britain and, in particular, American allegations of British collusion with regard to shipbuilding for the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. The Arbitrators ultimately found Britain liable, and awarded $15,500,000 to the United States. This decision remains controversial to the extent that it rested on rules which were not yet accepted as principles of general international law, and which clearly favoured the case of the United States from the outset. It is thus the purpose of this article to explore the facts behind the Geneva Arbitration, and to argue that the finding of British liability in Geneva marked the beginning decline of the laws of neutrality. Neutral Countries […] may be exploited by the Great Powers both strategically and as a source of additional armies and fleets. Of central importance to the game are those Neutral Countries and provinces which are designated as “Supply Centres.” […] A player's fighting strength is directly related to the number of Supply Centres he or she controls, whilst the game is won when one player controls at least 18 Supply Centres.

Treaties and Other Sources of Order in International Relations: The Soviet View

1958 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan F. Triska ◽  
Robert M. Slusser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet View ◽  
American Society

Speaking before the American Society of International Law, Aleksandr Troianovski, the first Soviet Ambassador to the United States, summed up his views on the basic sources of order in international relations. He began by rejecting the idea of a “supernational support” for international law, since the source of the rules regulating the relations among nations “lies in the nations, and not in a superforce acting from above the nations.”

Some British Opinions as to Neutral Rights,1861 to 1865

1929 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Baxter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Effective Use

In the controversy between Great Britain and the United States as to neutral rights from 1914 to 1917, both governments appealed again and again to precedents of the American Civil War. British prize courts as well as British diplomats made effective use of the Civil War decisions. Indeed, Professor A. Pearce Higgins has recently gone so far as to assert that, if one views the decisions as a whole, there was no greater extension of the principles of international law by the decisions of British prize courts during the World War than in the American cases.

The Study of International Relations in Great Britain: Further Connections

1986 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 626-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene M. Lyons
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Studies ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Political Experience

Aside from language, students of international relations in the United States and Great Britain have several things in common: parallel developments in the emergence of international relations as a field of study after World War I, and more recent efforts to broaden the field by drawing security issues and changes in the international political economy under the broad umbrella of “international studies.” But a review of four recent books edited by British scholars demonstrates that there is also a “distance” between British and American scholarship. Compared with dominant trends in the United States, the former, though hardly monolithic and producing a rich and varied literature, is still very much attached to historical analysis and the concept of an “international society” that derives from the period in modern history in which Britain played a more prominent role in international politics. Because trends in scholarship do, in fact, reflect national political experience, the need continues for transnational cooperation among scholars in the quest for strong theories in international relations.

The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-42
Author(s):  
Robert Vitalis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
American Science ◽  
The Way

We now know that the ‘birth of the discipline’ of international relations in the United States is a story about empire. The foundations of early international relations theory are set in not just international law and historical sociology but evolutionary biology and racial anthropology. The problem is the way in which scholars today deal with the place of race in the thought of John Hobson, Paul Reinsch, and virtually all other social scientists of the era. The strand of thought that still resonates in our own time about empire, states, and the like is raised up and depicted as the scientific or theoretical core in the scholars’ work, while the strand that involves now archaic racial constructs is downgraded and treated instead as mere ‘language’, ‘metaphors’, and ‘prejudices’ of the era. To undo this error and recover in full the ideas of early international relations theorists it is necessary to bring the work of historians of conservative and reform Darwinism to bear on the first specialists and foundational texts in international relations.

British Reaction to American Civil War Ironclads

Vulcan ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Jesse A. Heitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
United States Navy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Great Ease

By the 1840’s the era of the wooden ship of the line was coming to a close. As early as the 1820’s and 1830’s, ships of war were outfitted with increasingly heavy guns. Naval guns such as the increasingly popular 68 pounder could quickly damage the best wooden hulled ships of the line. Yet, by the 1840’s, explosive shells were in use by the British, French, and Imperial Russian navies. It was the explosive shell that could with great ease, cripple a standard wooden hulled warship, this truth was exposed at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. For this reason, warships had to be armored. By 1856, Great Britain drafted a design for an armored corvette. In 1857, France began construction on the first ocean going ironclad, La Gloire, which was launched in 1859. This development quickly caused Great Britain to begin construction on HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. By the time HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861, the Royal Navy had decided that its entire battle fleet needed to be armored. While the British and the French naval arms race was intensifying, the United States was entering into its greatest crisis, the United States Civil War. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of the United States Navy remained loyal to the Union. The Confederacy, therefore, gained inspiration from the ironclads across the Atlantic, quickly obtaining its own ironclads. CSS Manassas was the first to enter service, but was eventually brought down by a hail of Union broadside fire. The CSS Virginia, however, made an impact. Meanwhile, the Union began stockpiling City Class ironclads and in 1862, the USS Monitor was completed. After the veritable stalemate between the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor, the Union utilized its superior production capabilities to mass produce ironclads and enter them into service in the Union Navy. As the Union began armoring its increasingly large navy, the world’s foremost naval power certainly took notice. Therefore, this paper will utilize British newspapers, government documents, Royal Naval Reviews, and various personal documents from the 1860’s in order to examine the British public and naval reaction to the Union buildup of ironclad warships.

Remarks by Lori F. Damrosch

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 69-71
Author(s):  
Lori F. Damrosch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
Mission Statement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Past President ◽  
Universal System ◽  
Global Vision ◽  
American Society

Our moderator's questions begin with “in what sense is international law and in what sense isn't it universal?” and continue with whether international law may be “different in different places” and what the implications of such differences may be. I am here to defend the “universalist” perspective, as the immediate past president of the American Society of International Law and before that, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law. Though both the Society and the Journal have “American” in their titles and our geographic headquarters is in the United States, the Society's mission statement commits us to pursue “a just world under law,” which I interpret as a global vision for a universal system of international law.

War in the Scheme of National and International Life

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-559
Author(s):  
William L. Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Major Premise ◽  
Circuit Court ◽  
Minor Premise ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
The World ◽  
Annual Dinner ◽  
American Society

At the recent annual dinner of the American Society of International Law I listened with much interest to the eloquent and impassioned address of Judge Florence E. Allen, of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, asserting that the conservation of peace has not hitherto been, and should be made, the principal objective in the development of international law. I think that her views might be summarized not unfairly in the form of a syllogism. Undeniable is its major premise that war is cruel, costly in life and resources, full of horror—a terrible infliction on those who resort to it. The minor premise is that means exist and others may be discovered whereby disputes may always be settled and peace enforced without recourse to war. And so comes the conclusion that all these means should be sought for, discovered and used, after which war will be unnecessary and will disappear from the world, leaving us under the rule of perpetual physical peace, no matter what may be the mental and emotional differences between nations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document