Seventeenth Annual Grotius Lecture Series Some Thoughts about Grotius 400 Years On (2016)

I. INTRODUCTIONWhat would Grotius see as major challenges for international law and its practitioners our time? How would he approach them? How would he balance beautiful theory and ugly fact? Heritage and heresy? What lessons does he teach us dealing with our tasks today?1I will be looking back not just to the early seventeenth century, but also over the past fifty years. In 1965, I came to this meeting for the first time, travelling from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a Greyhound bus with Peter Trooboff. In the course of the last fifty years, I have been an observer and occasional participant the application and development of international law the face of major change and challenge, to refer to the theme of this conference. To mention one matter to which I will return, 1960, as I began as a junior lawyer the New Zealand Department of External Affairs, the second United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea was assembling. It will be recalled that it narrowly failed to adopt a provision for a six-mile territorial and a further six-mile exclusive fisheries zone.2 New Zealand, a few years later, adopted a twelve-mile fishing zone. Japan challenged the extension and proposed that the matter be taken to the International Court of Justice (Court or ICJ). Instead, a phase out agreement was reached.3 There were already much more extensive claims, notably the 200-mile claims to a patrimonial sea made by Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, and the practice relating to the continental shelf was developing apace.4Four hundred years ago, give or take a few years, we find Hugo Grotius the early 1600s addressing law of the issues as counsel for the Dutch East Indies Company the admiralty or prize court Amsterdam a dispute arising from the seizure by a ship of the Company of a Portuguese galleon the straits of Malacca, 1613 London. He was appointed as Pensionary of Rotterdam when he was just twenty-four. He negotiated Latin with James I of England about fisheries and much broader matters of trade the East Indies and, 1615, again London, negotiated over whaling around Spitsbergen.5 He was already a renowned author, especially on matters of theology, and a poet. But from that time, it is treatise on the law of prize, De Jure Praedae, or rather one chapter of it, that is relevant for my purpose. The treatise was prepared as a brief for the Dutch East Indies Company. The famous chapter, Mare Liberum, was published anonymously 1608 and was used by the English the 1613 negotiations. They quoted from the writings of the assertor Maris Liberi (the negotiations, written as well as oral, were largely Latin), taking a passage from the last paragraph of chapter 8 to the effect that freedom of trade is based on a primitive right of nations which has a natural and permanent cause that is part of the law of nature rather than the positivist law of nations.6 The argument may also be made that the legal underpinning which he gave to the role of the Dutch East Indies Company facilitated Abel Tasman's voyage thirty-five years later around the west and southern coasts of Australia and the first European discovery and mapping of New Zealand.II. THE VARIOUS ROLES OF GROTIUS THE LAWYERBy the time he is thirty, Hugo Grotius has already prepared an important work on international law of large continuing influence- as Professor Ernest Nys, an early honorary member of this Society, declared, in this battle of books, Grotius the better of Johannes Selden, his English antagonist. Grotius has undertaken work as an advocate; he has been appointed to two major public offices; and he has had a significant role diplomatic negotiations, although with some questioning effectiveness that role. When we look across those roles, it is the writing of Mare Liberum that is by far the most important for international law and international lawyers-taken as an independent scholarly work when it was fact part of a brief for the Dutch East Indies Company. …