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20 - The Laws of War- and Peace-Making

from Part IV - Grotius as a Legal Scholar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2021

By
Randall Lesaffer
Edited by
Randall Lesaffer  and
Janne E. Nijman
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Janne E. Nijman
Affiliation:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Summary

Grotius' two major treatises on the law of nations - De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis - both had the discussion of the just war doctrine as the backbone to their structure and argument. Whereas the older treatise was construed to argue the justice and legality of the taking of a Portuguese ship in East Indian waters, the more mature work aimed at a systematic exposition of the laws regulating the starting, waging and ending of war. Grotius offered a novel reading of the just war doctrine by rewriting it into the key of his general legal theory and his doctrine of natural rights as subjective rights under commutative justice. This chapter analyses Grotius' reframing o the just war doctrine and his re-systematisation of late-medieval and Renaissance legacies of theologians, canonists and civilians into a new doctrine of jus ad bellum, also giving some attention to its effect for the legal process of peace-making.

Keywords

Grotiusinternational lawhistory of international lawjus ad bellumuse of force lawwarpeacenatural lawlaw of nations
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius , pp. 433 - 456
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Aure, A.H., The Right to Wage War (jus ad bellum). The German Reception of Grotius 50 Years after De Iure Belli ac Pacis (Berlin, 2015).Google Scholar
Haggenmacher, P., Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar
Hathaway, O., and Shapiro, S., The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War (New York/London, 2017).Google Scholar
Lauterpacht, H., ‘The Grotian tradition in international law’, British Yearbook of International Law 23 (1946) 1–51.Google Scholar
Lesaffer, R., ‘Too much history. From war as sanction to the sanctioning of war’, in Weller, M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (Oxford, 2015), 35–55.Google Scholar
Lesaffer, R., ‘Roman law and the intellectual history of international law’, in Orford, A. and Hoffmann, F. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford, 2016), 38–58.Google Scholar
Neff, S.C., War and the Law of Nations. A General History (Cambridge, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onuma, Y. (ed.), A Normative Approach to War. Peace, War, and Justice in Hugo Grotius (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar
Reichberg, G.M., Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge, 2017).Google Scholar
Russell, F.H., The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar
Scattola, M., ‘Law, war and method in the Commentary on the Law of Prize by Hugo Grotius’, Grotiana N.S. 26–8 (2005–7) 79–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Straumann, B., Roman Law in the State of Nature. The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge, 2015).Google Scholar
Stumpf, C.A., The Grotian Theology of International Law. Hugo Grotius and the Moral Foundations of International Relations (Berlin and New York, 2006).Google Scholar
Tuck, R., The Rights of War and Peace. Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999).Google Scholar
Whitman, J.Q., The Verdict of Battle. The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, MA and London, 2012).Google Scholar

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