Of Spiders and Bees 191the present day. In 1791, the German scholar Georg Friedrich von Martens
began publishing a collection of treaties starting from the year 1761.
Th ese were not exercises in antiquarianism for its own sake. Th ey could
be useful to rulers who were interested in bolstering legal claims of various
kinds— and even forming the necessary just cause for a resort to war. Given
the frequency of wars in Eu rope in the period 1650– 1815, the hunt for just
causes— or at least plausibly just causes— could keep practicing lawyers
busy. Th is is a subject area that has yet to be explored in any detail. But it
may be noted that, in 1719, a French compiler named Père Lelong published
a collection of French historical documents, the principal purpose of which
was to support French expansionist policies by exhuming the original evi-
dence for sundry claims to neighboring territories over the centuries.
Another potentially rich source of information for the pragmatists, along-
side treaties, was judicial decisions. Th ere were no international tribunals in
this period, but national courts sometimes had occasion to apply interna-
tional law— and by comparing the judgments of courts of diff erent states, an
idea of the content of that law could be gleaned. Most noteworthy in this
respect were prize courts, which adjudicated the lawfulness of captures of
ships at sea during war time. Established by each belligerent state on its own,
nevertheless these courts were charged with judging according to the inter-
national rules of maritime law, as they had evolved since the Middle Ages.
During the eigh teenth century, prize court decisions gradually came to be
disseminated, although oft en in such extremely terse versions as to be of
limited practical use. Not until the French revolutionary wars would a sub-
stantial body of prize court judgments emerge.
Th e Early Pragmatist Writers
Th e earliest fi gure of importance in the line of pragmatist lawyers was
Zouche. While he subscribed to the Grotian distinction between the volun-
tary law and the natural law, he diff ered from Grotius in being interested
chiefl y in the voluntary law. His book expounded a host of practical questions.
It was, in fact, a veritable encyclopedia of the topics that, in the aggregate,
were coming to defi ne the study of international law: sovereignty, nationality,
various aspects of property rights (such as acquisition of title and determina-
tion of succession), diplomatic relations (including extensive discussions of