The legal order of the oceans has seen rapid developments and paradigm shifts. At least one of them has been described as a textbook example of a Grotian Moment: the emergence of the customary international law on the continental shelf, stemming from increased demand for oil and gas, coupled with technological advances and the Truman Proclamation of 1945. Now, eighty years later, the law of the sea is again faced with fundamental changes as the basis for maritime limits is eroded (...) by sea level rise. State practice, going back at least a century, has demonstrated that maritime limits normally fluctuate with physical changes to the coast. This understanding has not caused significant changes to the extent or location of maritime entitlements in a historical context. However, sea level rise stands to have catastrophic impacts as the submergence of individual coastal features can cause the loss of maritime areas spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. This realisation has ignited a movement to change the law on maritime limits. Around 2010, the first States began to declare that their maritime limits would be stable, notwithstanding subsequent sea level rise. Several States and a coalition of States have since made similar declarations and the study of the ila Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise indicates that the practice is in a phase of crystallisation. That suggests that new customary international law may be developing and the events leading to these developments might justify the use of the term Grotian Moment, leading to accelerated formation of customary international law or revised interpretation of the current law. The traditional requirements of State practice and opinio juris are not satisfied at present. However, the impacts of sea level rise on maritime limits may represent a moment of discovery that unveils a hidden truth about the law, overriding the traditional interpretation that renders maritime limits ambulatory. (shrink)

Since its 1980s coining by Richard Falk, the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept has garnered popularity in international law discourse, denoting a rapid, paradigm-shifting development in international law. This concept builds upon a prevalent recollection of two past events as such paradigm-shifts. The first is, obviously, the ‘original’ Grotian Moment, anointing Grotius as the Father of International Law, mainly for publishing, in 1625, his ground-breaking treatise, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, which is said to had brought about a momentous paradigm-shift that gave (...) rise to modern (statist and secular), or even the first-ever-effective, international law. The second event is the post-ww2 Nuremberg international trial. Presumably, from its mid-seventeenth-century birth to Nuremberg, international law was starkly statist, and so individuals had generally not been its subjects. This, among other things, meant that international criminal law (icl) was not acceptable. Nuremberg is, therefore, celebrated as the first-ever international criminal tribunal, as icl’s birthplace and even more generally as the turning-point in international law’s attitude towards the individual. Simply put, Nuremberg is considered the prototype of a modern Grotian Moment. However, this paper shows that neither 1625 nor 1945 were truly Grotian Moments (their significance notwithstanding) and present’s likely causes for those myths. The paper further reveals that these myths, as well as the current embrace of the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept, are all manifestations of a larger, understudied phenomenon: that internationalists, evermore obsessed with perceiving themselves as cutting-edge, too often satisfy that fix by erasing the past. (shrink)

This note announces the launch of a research project at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with the generous support of the Carlsberg Foundation and guidance from Prof. dr. Frederik Dhondt. The project explores the early steps of one of the most dynamic and debated branches of international law, namely the law of the sea. It focuses on the interactions between the principle of the freedom of the sea, maritime neutrality and small powers’ diplomacy in the long eighteenth century. Analysing the rich (...) archival material conserved in the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs – series Mémoires et documents, Correspondance politique – as well as the Danish National Archives, or Rigsarkivet, the project aims at the construction of a rich narrative of multiple uses of the law of the sea as an argumentative political-legal framework to express state and private interest. By a close reading of largely unexplored sources, the project contributes to the broader turn to state practice in the history of international law, a booming field of interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

This research note is the eighth instalment in our series of preliminary findings on the census and study of the reception of De iure belli ac pacis. The note presents a bibliographical description of Laurentius’ 1647 re-issue of the 1631 edition by Blaeu, considers Laurentius’ motivation and methods of production, lists and maps the currently known twenty-three surviving copies, and briefly describes two notable exemplars.

This research note offers a contextual overview of the printing history of Johann Blaeu’s 1646 octavo edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (ibp). The note examines the printing process of the last edition that was prepared while Grotius was still alive, though it was published after his death. The note also sheds light on the theological dimension of some readers’ annotations, and concludes by discussing the impact this edition had on the modern versions of the text.

This note studies the 1650 edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. Using online and card catalogues, we have located eighty-nine copies, thirty-seven of which we examined in person, with an additional six fully digitised copies online. We hope that this research note on the preliminary results will generate greater interest in this unduly neglected edition. The note shows how, despite the connection established in the history of seventeenth-century politics that emphasized the ties between Grotius and the Peace (...) of Westphalia, the reception of Grotius’s 1650 edition bore no relation to the debates at Osnabrück and Münster. However, this is an influential edition, cherished by collectors and authors. According to our findings, it would be reproduced in a number of later reprints. (shrink)

As our contemporary international order seems to come apart at its seams in the trenches of Eastern Europe, many observers have sought solace in the promises made by the historical crucible in which this order was forged. It was, after all, in the aftermath of a previous global conflagration that a planetary constellation of statespeople attempted to create an architecture that would save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ under the aegis of the ‘United Nations Organization’ (uno). In hindsight, (...) it is easy to look at the years that led to the creation of this international institution—and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) of 1948, one of its central pillars—as a decisive ‘Grotian moment,’ insofar as it promised a new age for international ordering. And yet, the historical record shows that those contemporary to the making of the uno and the udhr were less certain about the ‘Grotianness’ of the moment they were living. In this sense, I argue that the plural legacies of the years 1941–1948 have been contested and disputed from the outset. In this contribution I think with, and perhaps against, the notion of ‘Grotian moments’ to interrogate how a narrative of the udhr as a watershed period for secularized individual rights came to eclipse another account of the udhr, which highlighted the centrality of collective welfare for the post-war settlement. (shrink)

This chapter would have liked to invite its readers on an exciting but breath-taking journey through the historical landscapes of international law, since ‘time immemorial’ a male-centred and, until the 1990s, almost exclusively male intellectual tradition and professional practice – at least in the eyes of the currently dominating historiography. Helas, the ambition had to be downscaled into a few rapid zooms, touristic snapshots in an impressionistic mode, on seven contexts in time and space in a hasty timeline from the (...) eighteenth century to 2021. They reflect, merely as examples, women’s status in international law in diverse political, social and legal transformations or crisis. Some are representing moments of codification or the break-through of certain interpretations of women’s rights. Others are selected for their role in enabling women’s participation in decision-making or entry to international legal positions, or because they provide an example of women’s international activism for women’s rights. All of them might have preceded, followed, or in fact themselves constituted ‘Grotian Moments’ for ‘women’s rights’ – did they, and if not, why? Should they have? If yes, which ones and how, to what effect for ‘women’? (shrink)