Year: 1917
Type: article
Abstract: The analogy between natural persons and international persons was one of the main premises upon which the science of international law was founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.It was assumed that there existed a close resemblance, for many purposes, between the legal rights and duties of natural persons, subjects of municipal law, and the rights and duties of those juristic persons which are the subjects of international law.In one form or another the analogy was invoked constantly from the time when the law of nations first became a subject of juristic speculation and practical significance.The early conceptions of the nature of international society were based upon it.It furnished one of the essential premises in that process of reasoning by which the law of nature was applied to nations.It justified wholesale borrowing from the Roman jus gentium.It has had an immeasurable influence upon the subsequent development of international law, having been appealed to in later years as a reason for transplanting into the law of nations many concepts, principles, and rules borrowed outright from various systems of municipal law.An examination of the writings of the great publicists, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reveals something of the extent to which we are indebted to this analogy for almost everything that is regarded as fundamental in modern international law.Such a study shows that the analogy has had a significant influence in contributing to determine (I) our conception of the nature of international society, (2) our conception of the nature of the persons who compose that society, (3) our conception of the nature of the law applicable to that society, (4) the actual content of that law, and (5) the classification of the content of that law.It may be objected by members of a profession trained to look for law primarily in sources other than text-books and treatises 'Victoria, Relectiones undecim (Salamanca, 1565).First published at Lyons in 1557.See Barth~lemy in Les fondateurs du droit international
Source: The Yale Law Journal
DOI: 10.2307/787249
Author: Edwin DeWitt Dickinson
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2766193565