No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
When Grotius was a young lawyer he served for a time as counsel for the Dutch East India Company. Out of his early labors as a corporation lawyer there grew later two wonderful books ― one the De Jure Belli et Pacis, the greatest gift that any lawyer ever gave to the world, and the other, published in 1608, the Mare Liberum. In 1868, came to light the brief which he had written in a celebrated case in which the company had captured a rich Portuguese galleon in the Straits of Malacca. It was found that one chapter of the Mare Liberum had been taken bodily from this brief. At the time the book was written, Portugal claimed dominion of the eastern and England of the northern seas. John Selden of the Inner Temple, most famous of English legal scholars, answered Grotius by a work entitled Mare Clausum; but the stars in their courses fought against Selden and today the world rejoices in the freedom of the seas.
1 Text of the project printed in Supplement to this Journal, p. 147.
2 Printed in Supplement to this Journal, p. 148.
3 To the literature mentioned in this article should be added Essai sur la Navigation Aérienne en droit Interne et International, by Dr. Henri Guibé, published in 1912. This work contains an admirable discussion of the various theories which have been put forward upon the subject, and the author supports the view of the sovereignty of the underlying state subject to a servitude of the innocent passage of air ships.
The following item which appears in the London Times(Weekly Edition) of August 1, 1913, at page 622, may also be of interest:
“A Franco–German convention has been signed with a view to regulating air traffic between the two countries. Private aircraft will be at liberty to cross the frontiers, save in districts of military importance. State aircraft may cross only on authorization of the other state. If a military aircraft is forced over the frontier by weather it is to come down at once and report to the nearest military authority. In these circumstances extra-territorial advantages will be granted to the distressed aircraft,and it may not be detained.”