# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Westlake, John

​WESTLAKE, JOHN (1828–1913), jurist, was born at Lostwithiel, Cornwall, 4 February 1828, the only son of John Westlake, a woolstapler, by his wife, Eleanora, daughter of the Rev. George Burgess, of Atherington, Devon. He was educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1846; was sixth wrangler and sixth classic in 1850, and a fellow of his college from 1851 to 1860. He was called to the bar in 1854, and practised, becoming a Q.C. and a bencher of Lincoln's Inn in 1874, until in 1888 he succeeded Sir Henry Sumner Maine [q.v.] in the Whewell chair of international law at Cambridge, a post which he held till his resignation in 1908. He married in 1864 Alice, second daughter of Thomas Hare [q.v.], but had no children. He died at Chelsea 14 April 1913.
As a jurist, Westlake was equally eminent in private and in public international law. His Treatise on Private International Law, first published in 1858 but rewritten in 1880, was the first English attempt to give systematic form to this branch of law. With a profound knowledge of continental theory Westlake combined a practising barrister's intimate understanding of English habits of legal thought; and by its influence on the courts his Treatise has been the main formative influence in the development of a new branch of English law which hardly existed before he wrote. On public international law his most important works were Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1894), and International Law, Part I, Peace (1904), and Part II, War (1907). While Westlake did not neglect its historical and philosophical aspects he treated international law primarily as a branch of law. He strongly advocated the judicial settlement of international disputes, and was himself a member of the Hague international court of arbitration from 1900 to 1906.
In both departments of his study one of Westlake's main purposes was to reconcile English and continental traditions by promoting on both sides a better understanding of divergent views, and greater interchange of thought between lawyers of different countries. In 1869 he was one of the founders of the Revue de Droit International et de Législation Comparée, the first periodical of international law; and in 1873 of the Institut de Droit International, of which he was president in 1895, and a permanent honorary president from 1910. On social and political questions Westlake was a strong liberal, with a hatred of all kinds of oppression or injustice. He was a founder in 1854, with Frederick Denison Maurice and others, of the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street, a strong supporter of the enfranchisement of women, and an active sympathizer with the grievances of the Balkan nations and of Finland. He was elected liberal member for the Romford division of Essex in 1885, but differed from his party on the Irish question and failed to obtain re-election in 1886.
There is a portrait of Westlake by Mrs. Adrian Stokes in the National Portrait Gallery.
[The Times, 15 April 1913; Memories of John Westlake, containing a list of his writings (pp. 147–154), 1914; L. F. L. Oppenheim, Introduction to The Collected Papers of John Westlake on Public International Law, 1914.]
J. L. B.