JSI Seminar: ‘The Little Commonweale of my poore thoughts’: nature, ownership, Cosmography, and the origins of the climate crisis in Richard Zouche, 1613-63

In-person event

This seminar examines Richard Zouche’s legal thought on ‘nature’ at some of the earliest origins of the climate crisis and the formation of international law. Zouche is usually remembered as the ‘father’ of international legal positivism for his 1656 treatise An Exposition of the Fecial Law and Procedure, or of Law between Nations where he influentially introduced the term ‘jus inter gentes’ or law between peoples as the basis for his juridical system. In this work, Zouche deals extensively with questions of ownership in war and peace. He describes a tripartite right for princes and peoples as ‘Plenary’, ‘Hereditary’ or ‘merely Usufructuary’ rights both to holding power and property. He also deals with questions of sea jurisdiction and appropriation by occupation, which he expanded on in his posthumous treatise on the Admiralty courts.

Most significantly, Zouche solidifies two major tenets of legal argumentation that provided the early architecture for claims and extraction that formed the early climate crisis. First was the ‘jus inter gentes’ formulation that allowed for international law to be developed by consent between princes and peoples, referable to Augustinian concord but not bound by it or the law of nature. Second, Zouche’s modernisation of the disputation format gave ‘both sides’ of each of these legal questions, both obscuring Zouche’s own views and giving princes and lawyers a handbook with the argumentative structures for claiming and resisting legal disputes around ownership, showing the vital importance of these legal questions in the early history of international law. But it is in Zouche’s juvenile cosmographical poem ‘The Dove’ (1613) that an early vision of the political economy of the world and the importance of sight and ordering — the main tools of positivism — were first announced through the circling of Noah’s dove. Zouche called this poem ‘the little Commonweale of my poore thoughts’. The Dove provides an early announcement of the foundational commitments that thread through Zouche’s major juridical works. Throughout these works, Zouche’s engagement with nature and natural resources move quickly to questions of ownership and right, revealing the function of law to connect early forms of extraction, capitalism and empire.

About the speaker

Martin Clark is a lecturer at La Trobe Law School. His research focuses on the history of legal thought and international and public law. His work has been published in the Modern Law Review, the British Yearbook of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law and the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, and he is finishing a book (with Dr Yoriko Otomo) on law and commodities, Eating the World: A Global History of Law and Commodities (Counterpress). He was awarded his PhD in Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science in May 2020 for a thesis on the history of the ideas of ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ in British legal thought. At LSE he was a Judge Rosalyn Higgins Scholar and Modern Law Review Scholar (2018 and 2019).

He is an Editor at the London Review of International Law and Web Assistant at the Modern Law Review. Prior to joining La Trobe he was a Modern Law Review Postdoctoral Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School, a Lecturer at UTAS Law, where he taught contract and legal theory, and a JD Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where he taught contract

Thursday 29 August 2024, 6-7.30pm AEST

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.