Benjamin Straumann

Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice

What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French crowns to expansive Iberian claims supported by papal donations. Others have countered that allusions to terra nullius marked a temporary phase of imperial discourse and that claimants relied more often on other rationales for empire, rarely mentioning res nullius or terra nullius and often explicitly recognizing the ownership rights, and even the sovereignty, of local polities and indigenous peoples.

Adam Smith’s Unfinished Grotius Business, Grotius’s Novel Turn to Ancient Law, and the Genealogical Fallacy

In this Reply, I argue that pace Knud Haakonssen it is dubious that Adam Smith managed to ‘blow up’ Hugo Grotius’s universalist system of natural jurisprudence. Rather, Smith emerges as a closet rationalist who put forward crypto-normative universalist claims himself and found that he could not in the end improve upon Grotius’s system. Grotius was not seen by Smith as a ‘casuist’ tout court. I try to give an explanation for the tensions introduced into Smith’s work by his incorporation of key aspects of Grotius’s theory of justice. Furthermore, I try to clarify in what regard Grotius should be seen as a novel and original thinker. Lastly, I argue in favor of according ideas and arguments their own weight, against a facile contextualism that is always in danger of falling prey to the genealogical fallacy.

Early Modern Sovereignty and Its Limits

Abstract My Article seeks to explore a few antecedents of the idea that sovereignty may be encumbered with some obligations and duties vis-à-vis non-sovereigns and even strangers. Theories about limitations on sovereignty and obligations on the part of sovereigns often arose out of the fertile conceptual ground of Roman private law, in particular rules of property law governing usufruct and rules of contract law, such as those governing mandate. Early modern thinkers, especially Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), built on these ideas and, in addition, developed an account of moral and legal obligations arising, independently of God’s will, from a universal human nature. Building on Cicero, Grotius was among the first early-modern thinkers to elaborate the distinction between “perfect” duties of justice and “imperfect” duties of beneficence, an important idea that had wide influence through the work of Emer de Vattel (1714-1767). The Article closes by offering a few observations on the trajectories within which Professor Benvenisti’s concept of “sovereigns as trustees of humanity” could be situated.

Natural Rights And Roman Law In Hugo Grotius’s Theses LVI, De Iure Praedae And Defensio Capitis Quinti Maris Liberi

Roman property law and Roman contract law as well as the property centered Roman ethics put forth by Cicero in several of his works were the traditions Grotius drew upon in developing his natural rights system. While both the medieval just war tradition and Grotiuss immediate political context deserve scholarly attention and constitute important influences on Grotiuss natural law tenets, it is a Roman tradition of subjective legal remedies and of just war which lays claim to a foundational role with regard to his conception of subjective natural rights. Grotius made use of Roman law and Roman ethics in order to submit a normative case for a rights-based just war in the East Indies. His conception of a law of nature was originally conceived to apply a theory of compensatory justice to the high seas of Southeast Asia, envisaged as a natural state lacking political authority. Eventually, however, this argument was to reveal its anti-absolutist implications, and contributed—by virtue of its applicability to individuals, private entities and commonwealths alike—to the emergence of a rights-based constitutionalism. This article discusses Grotiuss early treatise De iure praedae commentarius (1604-1606) and its offshoot Mare liberum, which already contained an inchoate version of subjective natural rights, as well as the elaborate natural rights doctrine which can be found in Grotiuss early Theses LVI and in the Defensio capitis quinti maris liberi, a defense of the fifth chapter of Mare liberum, written around 1615 and directed against the Scottish jurist William Welwods attack on Mare liberum.