Positive International Law

Positive International Law

Lassa Oppenheim, in the book entitled The Future of International Law, about Positive International Law, wrote in 1921: 5. That, by the side of his international law, with its basis in natural law, there was also a positive international law, was not unrecognized by Grotius, but his purpose was merely to depict a system of international law which should compel universal observance irrespective of time and nation. And shortly after Grotius, Zouche and his followers did indeed attempt, in opposition to him, to formulate just such apositive international law, but it could not win for itself, at any ratein the seventeenth century, any great recognition; development was overshadowed by the system of Grotius, and many of his rules of natural law gradually obtained recognition in practice as customary law. But the increasing intercourse of states in the eighteenth century called forth a more positive school of international jurists, and the works ofBynkershoek, Moser, and Martens fertilized the soil on which in the nineteenth century there could gradually grow a really positive theory of international law, even if the scales which betoken its past connexion with natural law still adhere to the international law of to-day.