An Interpolity Legal Regime in the eighteenth century: 
procedural law of prize

IF 1.8 1区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY Past & Present Pub Date : 2024-10-30 DOI:10.1093/pastj/gtae025
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
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Abstract

Prize law was a legal regime that played a crucial role in maritime trade and warfare in the European imperial world before the twentieth century, governing both the capture and disposition of enemy property seized by belligerents at sea during wartime. Prize law outlined the rules by which captures were to take place and how captured property was to be handled, adjudicated, and (if “condemned” or deemed a valid capture), disposed of. All European maritime powers had prize regimes during the early modern era, which collectively adjudicated the fates of tens of thousands of vessels worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of today’s dollars. This article examines the procedural law of prize in the long eighteenth century: the rules that governed how legal actors in the prize regime brought cases before tribunals and the tribunals’ rules for adjudicating them. It shows that the law of prize was an interpolity legal regime, generated within the ambiguous legal spaces that existed between the jurisdictional boundaries of individual states and empires. The article focuses on three important areas of procedural law for evidence of the interpolity character of the prize regime. It looks first at the distinctive role played by mariners in prize procedures. Captains of privateers and other capturing vessels functioned as quasi-officers of the court, responsible for assembling the documentary record that prize tribunals used to adjudicate captures and bringing the cases before the courts. Imperial prize regulations gave almost no guidance on the rules that they were to follow. The proper procedures were defined by mariners and merchants themselves, as unwritten rules articulated at sea. Second, we turn to how the prize tribunals managed language diversity and translation. I show that, a few exceptions aside, prize tribunals did not acknowledge linguistic difference among litigants. Instead, the tribunals relied on silent and often unacknowledged translation processes, which embedded in their proceedings a fiction that all of the actors before them communicated in a common language. Last, the article shows that prize tribunals applied foreign law in their proceedings, in ways that were not formally authorized by imperial law. By focusing on the neglected procedural law of prize, this article offers a different view of the prize regime than the one that has been painted by many studies of substantive law of prize in the long eighteenth century, in at least two ways. One is that studying the procedural law of prize casts into sharp relief the bottom-up character of prize law. Far from being dictated by sovereigns or from imperial centers, much about the prize regime was created informally by lower-level legal actors. Second, a focus on procedural law reveals important continuities in prize law across space and time. Substantive prize law during the period saw extensive debates about the nature of neutral rights, among other issues, with different empires articulating radically different doctrines. The procedural law of prize, true to its interpolity origins, remained remarkably constant across empires and over time.
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十八世纪的国际刑警法律制度:奖金程序法
战利品法是一种法律制度,在二十世纪以前的欧洲帝国世界的海上贸易和战争中发挥着至关重要的作用,它对战时交战方在海上俘获和处置敌方财产进行管理。战利品法概述了进行捕获的规则,以及如何处理、裁决和(如果 "判定 "或认为是有效的捕获)处置被捕获的财产。在近代早期,所有欧洲海洋强国都有战利品制度,这些制度共同决定了数万艘船只的命运,其价值相当于今天的数亿美元。本文研究了漫长的十八世纪的战利品诉讼法:规范战利品制度中的法律行为者如何向法庭提起诉讼的规则,以及法庭裁决这些案件的规则。文章表明,战利品法是一种国际法律制度,产生于单个国家和帝国管辖边界之间的模糊法律空间。文章重点关注程序法的三个重要领域,以证明战利品法制度的跨地域性特征。文章首先探讨了海员在战利品程序中扮演的独特角色。私掠船和其他捕获船只的船长充当法庭的准官员,负责收集战利品法庭用于裁决捕获的文件记录,并将案件提交法庭。帝国的战利品管理条例几乎没有对他们应遵循的规则提供任何指导。正确的程序是由水手和商人自己定义的,是海上不成文的规定。其次,我们来看看战利品法庭是如何处理语言多样性和翻译问题的。我的研究表明,除少数例外情况外,战利品法庭并不承认诉讼当事人之间的语言差异。相反,这些法庭依赖于无声的、往往不被承认的翻译过程,这就在其诉讼程序中植入了一种虚构,即法庭面前的所有行为人都用一种共同的语言进行交流。最后,文章指出,有奖法庭在诉讼程序中适用了外国法律,而这些法律并未得到帝国法律的正式授权。通过关注被忽视的战利品程序法,本文对战利品制度提出了不同于许多关于十八世纪漫长时期战利品实体法研究的看法,至少在两个方面。其一,对战利品程序法的研究凸显了战利品法自下而上的特点。奖赏制度远非由君主或帝国中心发号施令,而是由下层法律行为者非正式制定的。其次,对程序法的关注揭示了奖赏法在时空上的重要连续性。这一时期的实质奖赏法就中立权利的性质等问题展开了广泛的辩论,不同的帝国提出了截然不同的理论。战利品程序法则忠实于其互斥性的起源,在不同帝国和不同时期都保持着显著的稳定性。
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来源期刊
Past & Present
Past & Present Multiple-
CiteScore
2.80
自引率
5.60%
发文量
49
期刊介绍: Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.
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