The Law of the Sea in Past Scholarship

Abstract The law of the sea is currently understood as a distinct field of international law that came into existence together with (modern) international law. Has this always been so? How did past international lawyers understand what we call today ‘the law of the sea’? Were they aware of the fact that this was a separate legal regime? And when did modern conceptions of the law of the sea emerge? This article examines past scholarship, from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, in order to identify how law of the sea was conceived in past scholarship and how this conception links to our current understanding of the field.